Batgirl: The Spooky Old House
by Lorendiac
Summary: Halloween in Gotham City, and Cassandra Cain meets one of Batman's old foes who has something special planned for the occasion.
1. Chapter 1: Where There's Smoke

**Author's Notes**: This is a Halloween-themed story featuring Cassandra Cain as Batgirl. It is set roughly around the time of the Batman and Batgirl comics which were being published in late 2001, after Batman had set her up with her own Cave in Gotham City. However, as with other Batgirl stories which I've written, I assume that Cassandra already has learned that Bruce Wayne is Batman, even though this is set before the events of the "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" story arc, which was when she found out in the regular comic books. Other than that, I try to conform to the continuity of that era. (If you really don't know or care about the nitpicking details of comic book continuity from around 2001, then you probably don't need to worry about this paragraph either.)

I'm starting it now in hopes of actually having the final chapter ready to post by Halloween.

* * *

**Chapter One: Where There's Smoke**

October Thirty-First. Just another day to Cassandra Cain, but people she trusted—namely Batman and Oracle—had been warning her for days that it was a "holiday occasion" to other people, and this would lead to unusual patterns of behavior. For instance, lots of people would be wearing "Halloween costumes" on their way to and from "parties."

Batman, a professional pessimist, had _stressed_ the point that Cassandra really shouldn't attack anyone just because they were silly enough to disguise themselves as Two-Face, or Joker, or any of the other "usual suspects" in Gotham City. He could have saved himself the trouble, really. Cassandra wasn't one of these people who got all uptight over what other people were _wearing_ on any given night. She could spot at a glance the difference between a warm-hearted nurse dressed as a wicked witch and a professional assassin dressed as a funny animal. And after meeting them once, she'd know them again, with or without the masks.

Ever since she'd met Batman and started being introduced to some of His fellow "superheroes," one of the things Cassandra had found particularly hard to grasp was the way most of the costumed "superheroes" in the United States took it for granted that wearing those flimsy little masks would _actually conceal_ their identities from people who already knew them in their other roles. Cassandra always knew perfectly well who Batman or Robin or Nightwing were, whether they were wearing masks and costumes, or suits and ties, or just swim trunks as they lounged by a pool, or whatever. Having met them before, she would have known any of them again, even if they began wearing steel helmets to cover their entire heads.

It had taken her some time, after she arrived in Gotham, to really come to terms with the idea that those silly masks actually worked on most observers. Sure, Cassandra had long known that she was way better than average at reading other people—but most of the people she'd met in other parts of the world hadn't bothered wearing masks in the first place, so that was one area where she'd never had to gauge her own perceptions against everybody else's.

Barbara had once said that what Cassandra could do with the nuances of body language must be very much like having "perfect pitch." She said that sometimes a person with perfect pitch had a terrible time believing his friends and family _couldn't_ hear (and identify) exactly what he heard in a piece of music, no matter how hard they tried.

(Then she'd gotten distracted by the sudden realization that she had no idea whether or not Cassandra had "perfect pitch" too, and insisted upon testing for it right away. The answer was "no.")

Now the sun was setting, and Cassandra was finishing up an exercise session in the separate Cave Batman had fixed up for her recently. Time to hit the streets. Cassandra pulled on her costume and resolved to think of herself as "Batgirl" for the next few hours, after she left the Cave. It would be good practice. Batman and Barbara and the others were very fussy about the "secret identity" thing. For most of her life, Cassandra had been very weak on the concept of "names"—she could tell people apart, but she couldn't learn their names for future reference because her language skills were almost exclusively in the area of "body language." An encounter with a sympathetic telepath had led to some drastic changes in how her brain functioned, and she'd quickly started matching up names with faces; this apparently being a very important "social skill" for normal people to have. It was rude to call one person by another's name.

But she rapidly learned it was more complicated than that—people often had many different names, and sometimes you could get in trouble if you called a person by a name that was "wrong" for him at a particular time and place, even if it would have been fine in a different setting.

Batman, for instance, was Batman, Bats, Bruce, Master Bruce, Brucie, Bruce Wayne, Wayne, Mister Wayne, Boss, Chief, Sir, and a few other names, depending upon who was speaking to Him, and which role He was playing, and what mood the speaker was in, and some other variables Cassandra didn't understand at all. For instance, Alfred often addressed Him as Master Bruce, but she _never_ heard anyone else do so—she didn't know what made Alfred's case different. (Batman had recently told her she'd be fine if she stuck with two simple rules: Just call Him "Bruce" when He wasn't wearing the costume and "Batman" when He was, and that would avoid giving away any secrets to people who didn't need to know. But it was obvious that many of the other people who knew "Bruce" thought the rules required them to call Him something else.)

For that matter, sometimes Batman was just That Man when Oracle was speaking of Him in His _absence_ (it was usually a _bad_ sign when she called Him that). In addition to the things His friends and employees might call Him, there were other names used by people who didn't really know Him. Tim had once told Cassandra that members of the media sometimes amused themselves by giving Batman colorful nicknames such as The Caped Crusader, The Darknight Detective, The Dark Knight, The Gotham Guardian, and others Tim couldn't remember offhand.

Nothing much happened during the first hour of her evening patrol, so Batgirl had plenty of time to keep thinking about the peculiarities of the human condition and this obsession with having lots of different names for the same people, and lots of different words for the same things you saw in the world around you. Oracle had tried to explain about "shades of meaning," but Batgirl still figured whoever had the job of creating all the words to fill up the English language had gotten so carried away with his own cleverness that he didn't know when it was time to quit.

"Batgirl," Oracle's voice finally said via circuitry in the cowl, near her left ear. "Something weird just happened, about five blocks north and two west from your present position. An ATM camera is picking up lots of smoke outside the bank, but no fire alarms are sounding. Might be camouflage for a crime."

"Right," Batgirl said, and made tracks in that direction.

While she traveled, she knew Oracle would be seeking more information from other sources. "That's funny," Oracle finally said around the time Batgirl was two blocks out from the target, "Two other cameras with overlapping fields are showing nothing exciting—just an empty parking lot, since that branch is closed for the night. Someone is playing games with looped footage or something similar, either to make real smoke and anybody lurking in it invisible to other cameras, or to create 'virtual smoke' out of thin air as a diversion for something else, depending."

"Real smoke," Batgirl said helpfully as she swung around a corner and saw the bank a short distance away. "Green. No flames, though."

"Real smoke it is, then. Tread carefully, kid. This already smells like a trap for someone. I don't think anyone else has called in the green smoke to 911, yet—should I try to get a prowl car headed in your direction as backup?"

"No," Batgirl said automatically, and grinned beneath her mask. It had been a pretty boring day, so far . . . but now things were looking up! If it really was a trap, she'd rather not have cops getting in her way before she had settled the hash of whoever was responsible.

"Why did I bother to ask?" Oracle muttered, and then shut up for a minute so Batgirl could concentrate on whatever was happening in the smoky parking lot as she approached.

Chain-link fence stretched around the parking lot on the three sides that didn't face the street; Batgirl scrambled over it and moved toward the ATM built into the wall next to the drive-through stations on this side of the bank. No signs of anyone ripping the machine open to get at the cash inside, which had been her first guess. There were some dark canisters scattered around the area, and a green haze still lingering in the air, thicker in some spots than others—

Suddenly, just as she stepped into the roofed-over area of the drive-through stations, a fresh cloud of green smoke surged up from the pavement, about fifteen feet in front of her, and then, as it began to dissipate, she glimpsed a man-sized figure in a green hooded robe standing in the middle of it. He hadn't been there before.

Batgirl instantly dove to the left, rolled, and came up into a crouch ten feet away from her starting position, still looking around for the real attack; she ignored the smoke-shrouded figure as irrelevant.

_Thump!_

Sure enough, a wide net had dropped down from above—must have been attached to the underside of the roof—and if she'd moved toward the figure as soon as she'd seen it, or even stood still for a few seconds as she studied it, then she would probably have been snagged. As it was, she'd barely evaded it.

"Bravo!" said an oddly-pitched, rather creepy voice from somewhere beyond the still-slowly-dissipating smoky area. The green-robed figure was still looming there, motionless, its outline getting clearer and clearer each time her eyes swept across it.

"Batgirl?" Oracle was saying. "What's up?"

She whispered her reply, knowing Oracle's computers would automatically pump up the volume until it was clear. "Green hooded robe, decoy, falling net, dodged."

"That was a _nice_ initial reaction," the creepy voice was saying chattily. "The first time I tried the inflatable-balloon-figure stunt on the real Bat, he fell for it, hook, line, and sinker! Lunged forward while I was stealing his Batmobile behind his back! Did he tell you all about it in a bedtime story, little bat fly?"

No. Actually, Batgirl had _known_ at a glance that the figure in the center of the newest cloud of smoke didn't have any living consciousness animating nerves and muscles; therefore it was a decoy; therefore the _real_ bad guy was probably observing—and planning to blindside her—from some other angle; therefore she had better move in an unexpected direction, fast. It was mildly discouraging to be reminded that even Batman couldn't see these things the way she could. She didn't feel the slightest need to explain all that to the Voice, though.

Even as she thought this, she was prowling clockwise to get around the smokiest area, while simultaneously staying extra-alert to her surroundings, particularly above, in case the man with the weird voice had a whole array of nets ready to fall at the proper times.

Oracle said softly in her ear, "I think you've just met Val Kaliban—The Spook. He hasn't been seen in Gotham for ages; not since the days when Dick was still Robin, come to think of it!"

"And?" Batgirl whispered, not really caring how long it had been since this man last made trouble. He was doing it right here, right now, wasn't he?

Oracle knew her well enough to get the point. She moved on to more practical matters. "Special effects artist. Disguises, tricks to fool the eye, hypnotism, suction cups in the boots to let him climb walls, other fancy gimmicks hidden in his costume—wait! Kick him, but _don't_ hit him with your _hands_."

That wasn't a problem yet—she was too far away. But why did it matter which parts of her body collided with his tender spots?

Oracle kept talking, answering the unspoken question. "Rubber soles on your boots. Insulated linings, too. I just found a file that says Batman once reported getting a nasty electric shock when he tried to grab The Spook—the outer layers of the robe were all charged up. He had to find a way to work around that. Later, he made sure to redesign his boots—and Robin's, and eventually yours, and so forth—to make it easier to cope with such circumstances. If you can kick the tar out of The Spook, it ought to get the job done. But your leather gloves are more conductive."

Batgirl got the general drift. She could see the real Spook now, stepping sideways himself to keep the balloon replica between the two of them as much as possible. The living, breathing man was also shrouded in a dark green robe with a hood that shrouded his face—although she thought he had a dark face mask on beneath the hood. He moved like a man with considerable self-confidence—and some training in martial arts and acrobatics. If the way he moved right now was the best he could do, then he was not up to her level in either area, but that came as no surprise; few people were. If she could land one good kick on him, she figured it would be as good as over.

But getting that close might take a little time. The Spook seemed bound and determined to avoid an immediate clash. Batgirl didn't want to charge straight toward him if that meant brushing past the balloon-figure; it might burst into flame on contact or some silly thing. The way The Spook kept moving back and forth to keep it between them was a strong hint (to anyone with her training, anyway) that there was something about the balloon which he seriously expected could defend him against her, under the right circumstances. Since it wasn't doing anything to hurt her right now, that _probably_ meant he needed her to touch it first. On the other hand, if he had rigged it with something seriously _explosive_, he wouldn't be staying within the blast radius—so Batgirl figured that if she just followed his example and never actually touched the inflated figure, she ought to be all right.

Hard to tell, though—that long, loose green robe served well to "muffle" the "voice" of most of his muscular twitches. Batgirl could have read him a lot more precisely if he'd just been in a T-shirt and jeans, say, with at least part of his face exposed for good measure. For that matter, most of the villains who always wore _spandex_ on the job were usually so _easy_ to read that she was often tempted to fight them with at least one eye closed, just to make it a _little_ more challenging.

Each time she danced a few steps to one side, The Spook matched her, keeping his inflated life-size replica almost directly between them at all times. Batgirl preferred a hands-on approach, but every once in awhile she actually felt the need to use the batarangs from her utility belt as missile weapons to mess up an enemy's plans. This looked like one of those times. She drew one with each hand and hurled the first batarang just to the right of the balloon, where the Spook's head was currently visible.

He ducked away—but without waiting to confirm which way he went, she'd _already hurled_ the other batarang lower and further to the left, aimed at where his head might end up if he kept trying to use the balloon as cover.

The second batarang barely missed the balloon-figure and bounced off the Spook's forehead as he moved exactly the way she'd thought he would (although she hadn't been quite sure). He grunted and staggered; he'd be slower for at least a few seconds. . . .

_Now._ Batgirl charged forward, dodging the balloon by at least two inches as it swayed gently back and forth in the evening breeze—but it suddenly burst anyway, without being touched! (No flame, though—just one loud pop.)

The Spook was leaping away now, getting further and further from her and the shredded remnants of the balloon—and she couldn't follow him because her legs suddenly went numb and she realized she was collapsing to the pavement, _barely_ managing to use her left arm to help break her fall—her right arm was already nonresponsive to stern orders from the brain, and even as she finished falling, rolling onto her back and then getting stuck there, she realized her left arm was also succumbing to whatever had brought her down.

At least she was still conscious, though she doubted that would last. Oracle was chattering in her ear. "Batgirl? Speak to me! What's your—"

Suddenly a white-gloved hand yanked her cowl up off her head and raised it to The Spook's eye level so he could study it closely. Batgirl knew he must hear Oracle's synthesized voice coming from it. "Oh, no, my dear child," he said in his usual creepy tone. "_This_ won't do at all. No back seat drivers need apply to the little party I have arranged for tonight."

Then he slid sideways, out of her field of vision, and she couldn't see what happened next—but ripping and crunching noises suggested no one would ever be using _that_ commlink again.

Before Batgirl blacked out, her last thought was a rueful recognition that some of those silly costumed tricks you ran into in Gotham really _could_ fool even a girl with her training . . . since she couldn't read all the subtleties of The Spook's tactics through his loose robe, and since the inflated figure had possessed no body language at all, how was she supposed to have known it was full of a paralyzing gas?


	2. Chapter 2: A Well—Lit Room

**Chapter Two: A Well-Lit Room**

Cassandra woke up to feel someone's fingers touching her throat. Just touching—not pressing hard enough to hurt anything—so she gave the someone the benefit of the doubt and grabbed the wrist and tugged it lightly away to find out if he'd take a hint without fighting over it. As she did this, she opened her eyes and waited a moment for them to adjust to the bright light.

The man wasn't resisting. His hand had moved the way she'd pulled it and now she could see his face peering down at her, looking concerned. Curly blond hair, glasses, pale skin, lean build, probably no taller than Cassandra herself, though it was hard to tell when she was flat on her back and he was kneeling beside her. Definitely too short to be The Spook, she decided. Besides, the attitude was all wrong. He was wearing an odd-shaped hat and a sort of heavy cloak that looked like a loose coat without proper sleeves.

He cleared his throat. "Well, Miss, I wondered if you still had a good strong pulse. I guess this qualifies as a 'yes.'"

Given the total absence of threat in his body language, Cassandra felt safe in ignoring him for a bit while she twisted her head back and forth to study her surroundings. Definitely not the parking lot—The Spook must have picked her up and moved her somewhere. This wasn't the interior of a bank, either. She was stretched out on light brown carpet. Beyond her boots, she could see a wall with two paintings hanging on it, one on each side of a tall bookcase. On her left, a couch; behind it, closed drapes concealed what was presumably a large window. On her right, beyond the kneeling man, a closed wooden door. Behind her head, a piano. No sign of The Spook at the moment. No restraints on her hands or feet.

She was still bareheaded, but wearing the rest of her Batgirl costume—or was she? Cassandra sat up and peered down at her waist. The Spook had swiped her utility belt too. Oh well, except for batarangs and ropes, she almost never used that stuff anyway.

The blond man asked, "What happened to you? I don't really think you _decided_ to take a nap on the floor when the _couch_ was available. Did someone—"

"Wait," she said, and rose to her feet. Her legs were working okay; the gas must have completely worn off. She dropped on all fours and did ten quick push-ups while the blond man just gaped. Then she stood up and ran through a couple of kata—the blond man quickly retreated to the couch to get out of her way—and she was relieved when none of the flexing and stretching and twisting of various parts of her body set off any serious alarm bells in her nervous system. Except for a sore left wrist and some trivial bruises, everything seemed to be in decent condition.

She had needed to check that before she tried anything tricky. She had been out cold for a while—no telling how long—and there were various nasty things which an evil man might do to a girl if he had her unconscious or otherwise _completely_ at his mercy. Cassandra _rarely_ had to worry about such worst-case scenarios for herself—but she had interrupted enough ugly moments between human predators and their chosen victims to give her a good grasp of the basic possibilities.

It was a relief to be sure that nothing really filthy or disabling had been inflicted upon her when she was out cold. The only _fresh_ bruises she could find matched the memory of her fall as the gas started to soak its way into her body, and that also explained why the left wrist was feeling cranky after most of her body weight had landed on it for a moment—but it was not broken, so she'd cope.

Lack of any clear physical abuse was good. Lack of sexual abuse was especially good—had it been otherwise, and had The Spook then been stupid enough to let her survive to wake up and realize what had happened, she would have broken some of Batman's rules about "excessive force" as soon as she got her hands on the perp.

After she had finished the second kata and stood motionless for about half a minute, taking inventory, the blond man finally tried to start up a conversation again. "Er, if you're done with your evening workout or whatever that was, could we talk about why we're here?"

She looked at him directly. "Yes?"

He waited . . . realized that was _all_ she intended to contribute at the moment . . . and said, "I was hoping you could tell me. I don't know where I am. Someone pulled a bag over my head and stuck a gun in my ribs—I think it was a gun—and made me get in a van—I think it was a van. Then we got to this house and he took the bag off when we were right outside that door." He pointed to the closed door. "When he shoved me into the room and slammed the door behind me, I saw you lying on the floor. I decided I should check your pulse. If you hadn't had one, I suppose I would've had to do—" He paused, flustered, and then got it out—"CPR. Glad it didn't come to that," he added hastily.

She knew what CPR was—but why had he hesitated as if he were afraid to even _mention_ it? That was what you were _supposed_ to do if the other person's heart and lungs needed a sharp reminder to get back to work, wasn't it? Then it dawned on her as she saw the way his eyes flickered toward her mouth and then hastily glanced away again. CPR included putting your lips in an airtight seal over the other person's each time you exhaled into their lungs, and apparently he didn't even like mentioning to a girl that he _might_ have ended up doing that sort of thing to her without an invitation, no matter how good the reason would have been. Too much like "kissing"? Too "suggestive" for the blond man's nerves?

Was he afraid of having her think he was a sex maniac? (Cassandra was reasonably certain she could mop the floor with him while blindfolded and with both hands tied behind her back if he did anything offensive, which she didn't think he would, so fear of being alone with him was not even remotely on her list of worries. . . .)

"Anyway," he said, obviously wanting to change the subject, "my name's Sergius. I'm a writer. What should I call you?"

Strictly speaking, she was supposed to be "Cassandra" whenever she wasn't wearing a mask, but given that she was still wearing the rest of her costume, it couldn't be hard for the blond man—Sergius—to guess she was the latest "Batgirl." Briefly the thought crossed her mind that it was Halloween and she _could_ claim to be an ordinary girl on her way to one of those "costume parties," but The Spook already knew better and might even have taken photos of her unconscious face for all she knew, so she abandoned the "it's just a costume" idea and resigned herself in advance to telling Oracle and Batman that her "secret identity" (such as it was) had just suffered another "security breach." Most of this had already been going through her mind before he asked for a name, so she looked him in the eye and said clearly: "Batgirl."

"Thought so!" he said, almost cheerful now. "I've met Batman too—he saved my life, years ago. I guess that was before your time—back when there was a red-headed Batgirl? I saw her from a distance a couple of times, but we never spoke."

He was telling the truth. And he'd been truthful when he said he didn't know what was going on. Cassandra—no, she'd better get back into the habit of thinking of herself as Batgirl—decided it wouldn't kill her to give him a very brief summary of what little she knew. "Spook. Villain. Gassed me." She shrugged to indicate anything beyond those facts—such as the villain's motives in bringing them together—was outside of her knowledge too.

The blond man cocked his head at her; he seemed to be expecting a bit more than that.

"So nice to see the children getting acquainted!" The Spook's voice boomed from overhead. (There must be a concealed speaker in the ceiling. In or near the overhead light?) "Now remember to play by the house rules, kids! This party cost me a lot to arrange, and I do expect you to socialize with all the other guests before you leave!"

The blond man asked, "I take it you are the host? Did you really go to all this trouble just to 'invite' us to a Halloween party? There have to be easier ways to find houseguests!"

The Spook laughed what was probably meant to be a terrifyingly crazy laugh—in fact, it was reminiscent of The Joker's. Sergius certainly was perturbed by it, but Batgirl's standards for "scary" were _much higher_ than most people's. A creepy cackling noise coming from a loudspeaker didn't come anywhere close to qualifying.

"Not just for that," The Spook said after his laughter subsided. "Let us make no bones about it; you are not here to be entertained by my hospitality; you are here to amuse _me_. Instead of immediately matching myself against Batman, who is such a ridiculous overachiever in every field that interests him, I prefer to start with a team who might be able to duplicate his versatility if they worked together.

"Think of yourselves as brains and brawn, my young friends. For the brawn, I wanted a young man or woman who could handle any purely physical confrontation with flying colors, but would be hopelessly out of his or her depth in a more cerebral challenge, and eventually I found the right candidate; a young lady closely tied to my old adversary, Batman, but lacking any clear sign of his deductive abilities. For brains, I wanted one of Gotham's literary lights, a spellbinding wordsmith, a virtuoso of the whodunit, a careful researcher who strives to learn everything a detective hero needs to know, instead of just faking it and hoping no one will care about inevitable blunders—but one with little training or aptitude for the really rough stuff. And I identified the best person for that role, as well—one whom Batman should remember fondly from the 'good old days,' in fact!"

The blond man beamed—and then The Spook finished sweetly: "But Kaye Daye is still on vacation on the West Coast, so I settled for Sergius."

Batgirl didn't know or care who Kaye Daye was, but the way Sergius's face fell made her feel sorry for him. It was sad to think he was so pleased with any apparent compliment, even from a villain, that it hurt him visibly to hear it turn into an insult a moment later.

After waiting a moment, presumably to let the insult sink in, The Spook resumed: "Think of it as a treasure hunt, kiddies. I am somewhere in this house. Puzzles are scattered about to make your lives easier along the way, if you can find them and interpret them and put the answers into effect. Of course, some of the other . . . guests . . . may choose to interfere with your activities at awkward moments; what can I say?"

Batgirl figured this meant other people in the house would try to _kill_ them. That was nothing new in her life, but the problem was that Sergius was a civilian who'd been dumped on her and now she'd feel responsible for protecting him as they went along. Leaving him alone in one room to wait until she had clobbered every possible enemy singlehandedly would probably not be safe for him—Oracle had said The Spook loved using all sorts of fancy tricks and gimmicks; there was no telling what else was hidden in this room, for instance, to make sure they didn't just sit here all night. The Spook was counting on Sergius to handicap her, of course, and it looked like he would get his wish.

Sergius asked, "Suppose we don't want to play your game? What if we just try to leave the house right now?" (Batgirl could see he didn't expect it to be that easy, though.)

The Spook laughed again, briefly. "I wouldn't want to ruin all the surprises. _Try_, by all means, if it will make you feel better!"

As he spoke, Batgirl was tugging at the right-hand drape to see what was behind it. A window, as she'd thought—and parallel bars of steel or something similar were just beyond the glass. If she smashed the glass, she could find out how securely the bars were fastened. A club would be nice. She looked thoughtfully at the piano bench—and then The Spook said, "Thirty seconds before the door to that room unlocks itself. I suggest you prepare for the worst!"

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Sergius is not an original character, although I can't blame anyone who assumed he was. His first and only appearance in a comic book was in a story published in _Detective Comics #487_ (in 1979) titled "The Perils of Sergius." Through a comical mistake, some members of the League of Assassins reached the conclusion that he knew something about their secret plans (actually, he was just writing a novel about an action hero smashing an _imaginary_ group of assassins) and so they hired some local hoodlums to kill him as a security precaution. Batman got involved in time to defeat a few murder attempts. It all ended happily, but Sergius simply has never been heard from again in the subsequent 29 years.

I've had that story in my collection for a long time—and when I worked out in my head approximately what sort of person I wanted Cassandra to meet when she woke up in The Spook's carefully-prepared "haunted house," I started asking myself if there was anyone in Batman's old continuity who would fit the bill. Suddenly Sergius sprang to mind. He being a writer of stories of action and suspense, it stands to reason that he'd be very brainy about all the clichés of murder mysteries and haunted houses and whatnot . . . but he never showed any sign of knowing how to take care of himself in a real fight. Cassandra, still illiterate at this early point in her career, is his exact opposite in those areas, so I decided to shove them together into the same place at the same time and see what happened. Incidentally, tonight Sergius is wearing a Sherlock Holmes outfit (which mainly means a deerstalker cap and matching cloak, suitable for hiking around in the English countryside in damp weather), but Cassandra doesn't _know or care_ about Sherlock Holmes, so she doesn't identify the getup as a "costume" at first glance.

Kaye Daye's name was dropped in this chapter. In the Batman comics of the Pre-"Crisis on Infinite Earths" era, she was an occasional supporting character; an award-winning novelist. She was also part of a detective club known as the Mystery Analysts of Gotham City. Batman was considered a member of the group for awhile and occasionally worked with the other Analysts on actual mysteries that caught their attention. As far as I know, Kaye has not been seen or heard from in DC's comics in over a quarter of a century, but I simply assume she still exists in the modern continuity. If you never heard of her before, that's fine! You don't need to know any more about her than what I just told you; she will not appear onstage in this story!

P.S. Don't assume that whatever The Spook says about tonight's agenda, in this chapter or later ones, is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Trusting a supervillain to be frank and earnest is usually a bad idea. . . .


	3. Chapter 3: Early Skirmishing

**Author's Note: **We'll switch to Sergius's perspective for awhile.

* * *

**Chapter Three: Early Skirmishing**

Something clicked in the doorknob—and then the door swung open. Framed in it was a man in a werewolf mask with brass knuckles on his hands. Someone else was standing behind him, but Sergius couldn't make out the details immediately—

Werewolf Guy made it a whopping three feet into the room before his head collided with Batgirl's fist. This was rapidly followed by his belly colliding with her boot, his neck colliding with the edge of her other hand, and his head thumping against the carpet as he fell. The second man—wearing a Frankenstein's Monster mask—had stopped in the doorway when his friend's fracas with Batgirl blocked his advance. Now Batgirl moved toward him, stepping daintily over the first attacker . . . the second man jabbed at her with a fist . . . and Sergius couldn't quite follow what happened next, but it ended with the Frankenstein's Monster Guy suddenly flying through the air and landing face-down on the couch by the window. The thug started to push himself back up—but Batgirl rabbit-punched him and the fight was over, just like that.

Sergius was relieved it was over, but he told himself he wasn't particularly surprised at the quick outcome. He'd never _seen_ Batman fight—Sergius had already been unconscious before the end of the one adventure they'd shared, years ago, so he'd missed the best part—but of course he'd heard stories. It only stood to reason that if this girl hadn't had the right moves to let her walk all over a pair of thugs in a matter of seconds, then Batman never would have permitted her to dress up as "Batgirl" in the first place.

"A nice opening number," The Spook's voice said chattily from overhead. "Now that you've earned the right to leave _this_ room, try your luck elsewhere if you hope to find me!"

Sergius wondered where the camera was. The Spook obviously knew who had won this little dust-up. Of course, he could just be playing the percentages—perhaps he'd never expected the first pair of attackers to be more than light exercise for a real superhero? But if this were a thriller novel, there'd be cameras in every room of the master villain's lair, so they'd better assume the worst. If they could find the cameras, and disable or cover them . . . then Sergius still wouldn't know what to do next to "take advantage" of that situation; he didn't have any secret weapons up his sleeve that he needed to hide from The Spook's gaze.

"I guess we have a choice of two strategies," Sergius said to Batgirl. "On the one hand, we can play The Spook's game and try to find our way to his control room, somewhere in this house." He supposed she was listening to him, but he had to take it on faith; while he spoke, she stepped out into the hallway through the now-open door, apparently didn't see any threats demanding her immediate attention, and glided silently back into the music room.

"Of course," he conceded, answering an objection she hadn't uttered, "That's exactly what he wants us to do, and he could have every step of the way booby-trapped. The other option is to circumvent the rules somehow and call an escape a victory. . . ."

Batgirl crouched, wrapped her arms around the middle of the piano bench, straightened up again, and stalked out into the hallway. Sergius followed her at a respectful distance; he was working on the theory that he was safer if he stayed close to her. What did she need the bench for? To stand on so she could reach a high place?

As he came out of the music room, he got his first good look at the layout of the house's ground floor. Over at the right end of the hallway was a big front door; that would be the way he had entered when The Spook (or a flunky?) had herded him indoors with a bag over his head. Directly in front of him was one side of a staircase, ascending upward (to his left), with the sort of very long, well-polished bannisters you expected kids to slide down in movies set in old Victorian mansions. To the left, a few more doors on this side of the hall, and then a big set of double doors, closed, at the very end. He stepped to the right to better see past the foot of the stairs. Another line of doors lining the other passageway on the far side of the staircase. All the doors he could see were closed, and all of them—including the big front door—had little electronic keypads set in the walls at the level of the knobs. _Treasure hunt_, The Spook had said. Somewhere in this house, there were clues to the passwords which would open those powered locks—a different password for each doorway, Sergius was guessing. (Actually, if he'd been writing a book about this, he would have made sure the Big Bad Guy had one master code which would open any door when he was in a hurry. But Sergius didn't really figure The Spook would share that with them, so he resolved not to waste any more time on the thought.)

_Krash!_

Batgirl had just shattered a window to the left of the big front door with a blow from the piano bench. The business end of the bench didn't penetrate very far though; it stopped abruptly after an inch or two. She drew it back and swung again, and then again, now getting a clanging result with each new blow. Sergius moved closer and peered through the window frame. Sure enough—thick metal bars; nothing much bigger than a ferret was going to crawl in or out that way.

Something tickled the inside of his nose, and he hauled out a handkerchief from a side pocket of his Inverness cloak just in time to muffle a sneeze. "Is something burning?" he asked as he stuffed the handkerchief back where it belonged.

Batgirl set the piano bench down on its four legs and pointed to the end which had been taking the brunt of each impact. The cushioned top was scorched at that end—because it had been colliding with the bars?

Sergius blinked. "So either those bars are electrified, or else they're extremely hot," he mused. "Either way, trying to rip them loose and crawl out through the window probably isn't a healthy idea. And it's a safe guess they extend in front of the door on the outside—or something equally nasty secures the door, just in case we try to break it down."

Batgirl nodded once. She didn't look surprised or disappointed by the conclusion; Sergius suspected she had only been going through the motions of trying to break out that way, just so she could feel she hadn't neglected the obvious. She didn't bother to explain her thinking, though—Sergius was coming to suspect she rarely explained _anything_.

So far, her entire demonstrated vocabulary consisted of: "Wait," "Batgirl," "Yes?" and "Spook. Villain. Gassed me." Seven words in the last several minutes? Not exactly a chatterbox. Granted: Batman was not the most loquacious fellow in the world, but at least he had been known to use complete sentences. Sergius's current theory was that English was not Batgirl's first language, and so she preferred to avoid the embarrassments of mangled grammar until she had taken more classes . . . although he thought she _understood_ almost anything he said. She was still somewhere in her teens, he supposed, but he was _terrible_ at estimating the ages of Asian women. (Not that he was much better with any other type of woman.)

It was embarrassing to see a superhero with her mask off, but apparently it was far more embarrassing for him than it was for her; she didn't look like she'd be losing any sleep over it. Of course, if The Spook was the guy who had removed her mask (as seemed likely) then she might figure her cover was already blown regardless of anything Sergius did or didn't see. (Not that he had any intention of ever spilling the beans on the "secret identity" of Batman or any of Batman's friends, and maybe Batgirl somehow sensed that?)

"If we can't get into these other doors without the passcodes," he observed, "then we must be intended to go somewhere else to find the first code. Upstairs, or toward the back of the house, or maybe downstairs if there's a basement."

Batgirl stepped around the foot of the stairs and pointed down the hall on that side, toward the rear. Sergius decided he was supposed to tag along. Wasn't like he had any better plans at the moment . . . sure enough, as he stepped in her direction she glided away. He decided to keep a distance of about ten feet between them, to avoid crowding her. She sure wasn't rushing, though—perhaps she was scouring the passageway ahead of her for signs of trip wires or other nasty devices, for all he knew.

"You realize," he added, knowing it was silly, "that anything useful we find in this house, we'll have to fight for." Even as he said "we," he knew he really meant: _You'll have to fight for it_; he'd never liked pain enough to stay in any self-defense classes long enough to count for much. He was not a diehard pacifist, but she shouldn't count on him to be more than a brief distraction for any huskier, and/or well-trained, combatant. He wondered if he should say so.

Without glancing back at him, Batgirl waved her left hand in a dismissive manner which he interpreted to mean: _So what?_

The hallway on this side of the stairs made an abrupt right turn. Sergius, following in Batgirl's wake, saw that the hallway ended in an open doorway—perpetually open; no doors in sight—with what looked like kitchen counters beyond. Batgirl moved forward, and just as she was about to spring through the doorway into the kitchen—

"Welcome to my kitchen!" said The Spook's voice through speakers, both in the hallway and inside the kitchen, Sergius thought. "Enter freely and of your own free will!"

_Well, so much for the element of surprise,_ Sergius thought dourly. Anyone lurking in ambush knew it was time to get ready to offer a warm reception, courtesy of The Spook's loud greeting.

Batgirl took the invitation at face value and dove through the doorway, rolling as she hit the floor. Sergius didn't rush to follow—his decision was inspired by the way a carving knife suddenly flew through the air from the right of the doorway. Batgirl dodged it easily as she spun in that direction, and the knife kept going past her shoulder and out of Sergius's field of vision, until he heard it _thump_ into something (probably a wall).

Sergius guiltily accepted that he'd be useless in a kitchen battle with cutlery slicing through the air, and stayed back in the hallway to see how things developed. Meanwhile, The Spook suddenly decided they needed a soundtrack. Loud, ominous music filled the air. Sergius couldn't identify the tune, but it sounded as if it came straight from a horror movie, in one of those scenes where something terrible is about to materialize. _Psychological warfare,_ he told himself . . . and in his case, it was working. He knew his pulse was speeding up, he thought he was sweating more than he should be . . . but he had no idea how Batgirl felt about it; heck, for all he knew, she might be tone-deaf!

After a moment, his ears adjusted enough to let him sort out the noises from the kitchen that _weren't_ part of the music. Things thudded against other things. Glass broke. Metal clanged. Someone screamed like a girl. The music stopped a moment after that. Silence from the kitchen. Sergius wondered just how long he might stand here before he worked up the nerve to poke his head through the doorway and see what—

_Never mind. _Batgirl suddenly appeared in the open doorway and crooked a finger, beckoning him in. She looked none the worse for wear; obviously no one had managed to connect with her face, nor cut any portion of her flesh—although he supposed she might have acquired a few sprains or contusions which didn't show through the dark leather outfit which covered every inch of her slender body below the neck. He remembered The Spook saying they had to work together as brains and brawn; apparently she figured the stage was set for Sergius to start doing his share.


	4. Chapter 4: The Game Is Afoot

**Author's Note:** My flash drive, with a copy of my work on this story, seems to have died. Then a floppy disk with a backup on it almost died, but I was eventually able to retrieve the key data. Then my car battery died (this is relevant because I don't have net access at home). Oh, and the dog ate my homework. (Okay, okay, that last one was a joke—I don't even have a dog!—but the rest of it all happened recently, and it tended to set me behind schedule in my efforts to polish up the rest of this story. I won't be finishing it today, even though I had hoped to have it done on Halloween when I began it, but I'll give you some more to tide you over. I may even have another chapter ready tomorrow night; a good chunk of it has already been written.)

* * *

**Chapter Four: The Game Is Afoot**

Sergius advanced into the kitchen, twisted his head around to take it all in, and immediately realized he had an awkward problem. Sherlock Holmes would have taken it in stride with a British stiff upper lip, but Sergius was not the Great Detective, even if he'd intended to present himself that way at a party tonight. . . .

There were four unconscious bad guys in this kitchen, two men and two women, all stretched out on the linoleum floor after Batgirl had finished whaling them; and all four were all made up as vampires—pasty-white skin, blood-red lips, artificial fangs, kohl (or something dark) around the eyes, and at least two of them were wearing wigs. . . .

That wasn't the problem.

Batgirl evidently expected Sergius to live up to his Sherlock Holmes outfit by cleverly finding some clue here that would let the pair of them advance to the next stage of the game.

That wasn't the problem.

But the two women were both wearing diaphanous, slinky, low-cut gowns (if you could even dignify those gauzy things with the word "gowns"—maybe they were fashionable "nightgowns" from Paris for all he knew), and that was a problem! For him, at least, although he doubted Batgirl had any strong feelings on the subject.

Sergius was not equipped to look at such sights without getting flustered. His maternal grandmother would have euphemistically said these foolish girls were in dire peril of catching pneumonia. Even if it had been the hottest day of the year, she still would have phrased it that way. His other grandmother would have been more blunt about what else the young ladies were risking by parading around in such attire.

Sergius certainly was not immune to feminine pulchritude, but he _really_ liked to think he wasn't the sort of guy who went around _ogling _women's chests. Even when, as in this case, it seemed virtually certain the women had _wanted_ to inspire that reaction in male observers when they chose what to barely wear for All Hallows Eve. (Or perhaps they hadn't exactly chosen—but merely accepted the selections of their presumed employer, The Spook?) Looking at these women at all, under the circumstances, was going to amount to much the same thing as ogling. Or at least it would probably look to someone else as if he were ogling, even if he ordered himself to keep his gaze away from those low necklines as much as humanly possible. And there was at least one other conscious observer still in the room—Batgirl—and he'd really prefer to make a good impression on her.

It only took him a few seconds to take in the situation, re: the Vampire Chicks. Then Sergius determinedly examined the rest of the kitchen. Everything seemed clean and orderly, except for some broken glass and scattered cutlery—presumably the "vampires" had tried to use those things as weapons against Batgirl, and a fat lot of good it had done them.

From the way The Spook had described the game he intended to play, there ought to be a clue somewhere that required the skills of a professional mystery writer to untangle. In theory, it could be anywhere—taped to the bottom of a drawer, rolled up in a bottle inside the refrigerator, even written in tiny characters on the surface of a light bulb in the fixtures overhead—but Sergius strongly suspected he should start with the people Batgirl had subdued. The inanimate objects in the kitchen weren't going anywhere; an inch-by-inch search of them could be postponed for awhile.

Sergius figured he had a fifty-fifty chance of finding whatever he was supposed to find on one of the Vampire Guys. Both of them were wearing tuxedoes—lots of places for something to be hidden in a pocket, or inside a lining, or whatever. So it was a good place to start—for him, the prospect of frisking unconscious men did not fall into the "guilty pleasure" category.

Sergius had never searched another human being's clothes in his life, but he improvised. How hard could it be?

He started with a tall, broad-shouldered guy whose long dark hair proved to be a wig. Sergius checked pockets and shoes, pulled off the coat and ran his hands along it for lumps or bulges or whatever. He pulled off the wig to inspect the lining. Nothing.

He gave the same treatment to the other guy, a swarthy man, barely taller than Sergius but much huskier in his build. Nothing.

He patted them down more thoroughly, searching for anything hidden under an arm, or strapped to a leg beneath the trousers, or strung around the neck. More nothing. Not even wallets or cellphones; someone had "sanitized" these people to make them hard to trace if captured.

He could strip these guys naked if he just had to, to make sure he hadn't missed something tiny, but he sure wasn't looking forward to it and he had a hunch The Spook didn't expect him to take that much time; it would slow the game down too much. Maybe. But who could say how a villain got his jollies? Voyeuristic tendencies? The jerk was probably watching everything via concealed camera right this minute!

Still, looking at naked men's bodies to see if they had clues tattooed on their butts (or anything else that could only be detected by removing clothes) definitely qualified as "only as a last resort." It would make more sense to give the distaff members of the foursome the same treatment, before pushing things any further. Probably save time.

Sergius finally looked back at the Vampire Chicks, as he now thought of them. They still looked gorgeous, and he supposed they could still have something hidden away in some unlikely spot . . . he grimaced as he felt the temptation to use that excuse mounting, and then he _finally_ saw the obvious solution. He would have thought of it sooner if he hadn't been so painfully self-conscious about the entire situation.

"Batgirl," he said urgently, "please search the two ladies to see if anything unusual—pieces of paper, for instance—is hidden on their persons. I really don't—I mean—well, please, just search them!" (The Spook had implied she was no detective, but that didn't mean Sergius had to do all the searching, did it?)

Batgirl flashed a warm smile at him for no apparent reason—and Sergius had the sudden horrifying suspicion that she somehow knew exactly what had been going through his mind regarding those women. Was she silently congratulating him on his self-restraint in not seizing a reasonable excuse to run his hands over their defenseless bodies and call it "detective work"? He suddenly suspected his cheeks were flaming if they hadn't been already—one of the curses of being a shy white guy with a particularly pale complection and an awkward set of scruples.

He quickly turned his back while Batgirl ran her hands over the Vampire Chicks. As it turned out, she only needed about two minutes to find a white folded square stuffed into one woman's high-heeled slipper. He turned back when she snapped her fingers for his attention. Batgirl didn't even bother to open her prize for a quick look before handing it to Sergius, and it suddenly occurred to him as he accepted it from her gloved fingers that perhaps she couldn't read—not English, anyway?

"Right," she admitted suddenly, and he froze as he asked himself if he had absent-mindedly muttered that speculation of illiteracy aloud.

"No," she said, obviously not offended, and he suddenly feared she had short-range telepathy. Now that was scary—a guy would never have a moment of mental privacy when such a girl was around, digging into his most embarrassing memories!

"No," she said in a reassuring tone, shaking her head to emphasize the denial, but she was grinning now, suddenly looking very much like a precocious little girl who's somehow outsmarted an adult three times running and is naturally proud of herself. Now Sergius was afraid of even thinking anything about her, for fear—

The Spook saved him. Sergius had never expected to feel grateful to a notorious killer, but he was relieved when the deliberately creepy voice said conversationally from somewhere overheard, "I don't know what it's all about, but that's a very _one-sided _conversation. Are you trying to talk his ear off without letting the poor fellow get a word in edgewise, my little vespertilionid?"

Batgirl looked puzzled—probably thinking: _I'm his little what?_

"I'm fairly certain a 'vespertilionid' is a member of a large family of bats," Sergius said helpfully. He couldn't blame her for not knowing that; few people would. It wasn't a word you heard in normal conversation; not unless you happened to find yourself sitting near Kirk Langstrom at a dinner party. (As a side issue, it occurred to him that Batgirl's failure to comprehend the word tended to support the idea that she _wasn't _telepathically scanning Sergius's brain, or else she would have understood that epithet as quickly as he had . . . er, wouldn't she?)

The Spook didn't pursue the subject of the one-sided conversation he hadn't understood, so Sergius finally unfolded and studied the piece of paper. Torn out of a small spiral notebook, obviously. A single line of handwritten text:

_Star of 1st Eng. Lit. novel about them_

Sergius pondered. Under the circumstances, "them" almost had to be "vampires." So far, so good, but bloodsuckers weren't one of his specialties. Thrillers, mysteries, that sort of thing, but he'd never been wildly enthusiastic about reading or writing straight horror. Bram Stoker's _Dracula _had been acclaimed a century ago and was still famous now (Sergius had tried to read it once, and all he could say was that popular tastes must have changed _drastically_ since Stoker's day), but it hadn't been the _first _vampire novel in English, had it? Nor had LeFanu's _Carmilla_, although Sergius had actually found that one much more readable when he ran across it in a library when he was about eleven. . . .

Then he thought he had it. Like a telephone, the keypad beside the door had letters in tiny type on squares 1 through 9. Therefore, 8-2-7-6-3-9 could spell VARNEY, as in _Varney the Vampire_. He punched that in, hit the ENTER key at the bottom of the pad, and heard something go click near the knob. He was partly proud and partly disappointed when it actually worked. This commonplace "Trivial Pursuit" approach had been easier than he expected.

Batgirl pulled Sergius away from the door and yanked it open, then charged in. Sergius grabbed the edge of the door before it could close again—it suddenly occurred to him that he didn't know if they'd be able to open it again with the same code if it swung shut. Then he poked his head around it to see what was happening. He had thought a dining room would be located in this corner of the house, and he'd been right—a table was set along one wall, with a punch bowl and several types of refreshments laid out along it, and there were Halloween-themed decorations on the walls; the first such decorations he'd seen in this household (if you didn't count people's costumes as having "decorative" functions).

Speaking of which, four stereotypical pirates had apparently been lurking near this door, all with cutlasses, all looking ready to go board a gold-laden galleon on the Spanish Main! At least four more pirates were clustered near a double door set in the wall over on the left, still turning to study the situation as their buddies began fighting the superhero in their midst.


	5. Chapter 5: The Clash of Steel

**Author's Note:** I ended up splitting the rough draft of Chapter Five in half—this installment was originally going to be _much_ longer, but instead I'll save the rest of it to be the _next_ chapter. Sorry about the long delay, but after I knew I had completely blown my self-imposed deadline of having this all done by Halloween, it just didn't seem so urgent (although I still know where I'm going with the plot, believe it or not).

* * *

**Chapter Five: The Clash of Steel**

The upside of seeing Batgirl take on eight cutlass-wielding pirates was that Sergius finally got a chance to see her fight for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The gleaming lights of the huge chandelier suspended from the middle of the high ceiling made sure he got a good view of the entire spectacle.

One man, wearing a virulent green headscarf above the obligatory eyepatch which at least one member of any pirate crew was presumably obliged to sport, slashed horizontally with his cutlass—Batgirl ducked under the slash, swept Eyepatch's legs out from under him, and then her right hand did something to his neck while her left hand grasped the hilt of the cutlass he had dropped as he frantically tried to break his fall. Then she parried a red-bearded man's cutlass with her new acquisition while one of her feet knocked the breath out of a woman with long blond hair closing in from another direction.

By then, the four pirates who had been guarding the other door were arriving to reinforce the two still standing. It didn't seem to matter. Batgirl whirled away, her captured cutlass gleaming as it caught the light, and the pirates began spreading out, presumably hoping to outflank her until they could slice at her from six directions at once.

Sergius had worried that he might need to slam the door in a hurry if one of the pirates decided to go for the easy target first while the others confronted the difficult one. It didn't happen. Apparently the baddies wanted to make sure the hard target was down before they worried about the small fry.

Sergius couldn't fault their priorities. If he were in their shoes, he'd be more worried about the superhero too. And he couldn't help thinking that with so many pirates, all it would take was _one_ lucky slash or thrust to score a serious wound and handicap Batgirl, and then she'd finally be a sitting duck for a mass assault. The law of averages probably made it vanishingly unlikely that she'd be successful in evading every blow aimed in her general direction . . . but it was pretty clear that she either didn't know that or refused to worry about it.

Watching what happened over the next minute or so, Sergius was strongly reminded of an old pop song: "Poetry in Motion." Batgirl was like that, although violent motions weren't exactly what the songwriter had envisioned. Never a wasted move, never starting to do one thing and then awkwardly changing her mind in the middle, never freezing from indecision; each move seemed to follow naturally from the last in a constant flow of graceful interaction with the pirate crew, as if she were merely dancing around the floor in a series of perfectly rehearsed interactions with a chorus line hired to make her look good.

"Dancing" was the apt word, he decided—the slender girl was always at the center of things and yet never impeded by anyone's feeble attempts to force her to stop moving.

Slashes were parried or else whistled harmlessly through the spot in the air she was no longer occupying; sudden lunges flew past her torso without so much as snagging her clothing; one black-cloaked pirate's attempts at leg sweeps only served to fill the suddenly-empty space between the floor and her feet; and yet wherever she went, her own strikes and throws were timed perfectly, as if each pirate had been sternly ordered to move along a certain path just in time for a portion of his anatomy to intercept Batgirl's hand or boot or elbow or knee converging on the same spot from a different angle.

She never drew blood with her cutlass, though—Sergius decided she viewed it as a defensive tool only. Sometimes she slashed with it and was parried, but it always seemed to turn out that this still brought her closer to whatever she had really wanted to do, either to the person parrying or to some other pirate who'd foolishly assumed her attention was entirely focused on the other guy at that moment.

It was as if the director of an action flick had solemnly told a gang of stunt men to put on a good show, but as they valued their paychecks, be sure to pull their punches and make sure they never bruised a single square inch of the leading lady's ever-so-delicate flesh. But Sergius knew better—those blows weren't pulled or misaimed; those cutlasses weren't blunted metal or painted cardboard; Batgirl simply refused to bleed for the pirate crew's enjoyment! It was becoming quite clear—if it had ever been in doubt?—that _their_ intentions for this battle were remarkably irrelevant!

Not that any of the baddies were actually voicing any intentions—nor anything else at the moment—and that bothered him. (Not enough to make him try to quiz them about their taciturnity, however.)

At last this end of the ballroom was carpeted with the unconscious bodies of buccaneers, and Batgirl paced around, delivering, few last strikes against a neck here and a neck there before she was completely satisfied with her handiwork.

Sergius wiped his forehead as he realized it was finally over. This stage of it, anyway. Batgirl seemed mildly amused as she looked at him and asked, "You were . . . worried?"

"At first. No matter how fast you are, you're still flesh and blood, and that looked like awfully sharp steel flashing all around you. I mean, Batman probably would have parried the cutlass attacks with unbreakable batarangs, but you didn't have any defensive weapons to work with." (Sergius was guessing The Spook had confiscated her utility belt in order to handicap her—if so, it didn't seem to be making much difference.)

Batgirl raised her eyebrows and twirled a cutlass with her right hand by way of silent rebuttal to his last comment.

"Well, sure, you've got that cutlass _now_, but you didn't when the fight _started_."

"Close enough."

Sergius needed a few seconds to work that out. "Are you saying that, as far as you're concerned, giving these clowns cutlasses and then letting you fight them was virtually the same thing as giving _you_ any cutlass you wanted?"

She gave him a thumbs-up.

Sergius sighed. "And the fact that there were _eight_ pirates, all intending to kill you with their nice sharp cutlasses before you could confiscate one and start parrying the other seven, didn't matter?"

Batgirl shrugged; obviously she saw _no reason_ to fret over such trifles as eight-to-one odds.

Sergius was starting to get some insight into how her mind worked—or at least, as a writer, he liked to _think_ he was. If he continued this line of questioning, she'd probably find a way to point out that all eight pirates had never been positioned to strike at her simultaneously, so it hadn't _really_ been eight-to-one odds at any given _moment,_ so why worry? (He made a mental note to have the hero of his next novel say something similar.)

Coming from some people, such a nonchalant attitude would have meant they were secretly quite proud of their victory, but feigning modesty so as to give the false impression that they did such things several times a week with nary a twinge of fear_._ In Batgirl's case, he didn't think she played such games—or worried about what anyone else thought of her courage, for that matter.

Perhaps she somehow knew he was giving up on this line of discussion before he could even say so. Perhaps she figured further chatter could wait until she was sure the room was secure. Perhaps she just plain lost interest. At any rate, Batgirl spun away from him, further into the ballroom, and started moving across the empty space in the middle toward the long table festooned with dishes at the far end.

Something was nagging at him, but he couldn't put his finger on it. Was it the way The Spook had stayed silent since they entered this room? The possibility of Batgirl stepping on some artfully concealed trap in the wooden floor? Just general suspicion that things had been too easy so far? Or—

"The chandelier!" he shouted.

Before he finished the fourth syllable, Batgirl had glanced back over her shoulder at him—then she _moved, _dropping her cutlass and doing a back handspring very fast indeed—just as the chandelier groaned and came crashing down where she had been a moment earlier, making a horrible shattering noise, with stray bits of glass flying every which way. Somehow Batgirl already had one hand yanking her cape up to protect her head in the nick of time as she landed on her feet, and when she turned to face Sergius she was already shaking off glittering fragments the way a dog would shake off water after an unwanted bath, but he didn't see a single drop of blood to suggest anything had so much as scratched her face. The rest of her should have been adequately protected by dark leather. He'd been far enough away that he'd gotten off unscathed—especially since Batgirl had been between him and the crash site.

"Thanks," she said simply, then pointed at the shattered ruins. "You said . . . shandy. . . ."

"Chandelier," he said, and then repeated it carefully, twice, until he saw her nod as if to say: _Got it now. _"Wait," he added as a thought struck him. "If you didn't know that word before—how did you know what I was trying to warn you about? I didn't get far enough to tell you which way to move, or to guard your face from flying glass, or anything."

Batgirl opened her mouth—then shut it firmly and cupped her left ear with her hand, a signal which could mean _I can't hear you_—or, he realized suddenly, _Someone else _can _hear us. _(The Spook, for instance.)

"Oh," Sergius said, thinking furiously. "Right. You saw me _starting_ to point. You're quick on the uptake!" (He hadn't been pointing at anything, but he might have in another second or two, when it occurred to him. Possibly The Spook would believe this hasty improvisation.)

She'd _looked_ at him when he yelled, just a fleeting glance—and she'd somehow divined that he was currently worried about something above her even though he hadn't named it or gestured toward it. Without hesitation, she'd gotten out from under, just as he'd hoped she would. But until she _saw_ him, she hadn't known where the threat was?

A tenuous theory about the _limits_, and thus the possible _nature_, of her occasional "mind-reading" stunt began to percolate in his brain. (Not that he had the slightest intention of voicing his new theory when The Spook was eavesdropping.)

Batgirl winked one eye at him, so fast he wasn't quite sure he had seen a wink at all. Then she said, possibly to change the subject more than anything else, "Yes. You knew—how?"

"Because I read a lot of genre fiction and call it 'professional research.' See a lot of movies, too."

She frowned slightly, giving him a level gaze which somehow suggested he'd better not think he was going to get away with calling that a full answer.

Sergius hastily amplified his reasoning. "The chandelier. I didn't really notice it when you were tussling with the pirates, but it's a common prop in one of the hoariest clichés in the book. If there's a big, highly visible chandelier in certain types of fiction, then it _always_ falls at a dramatic moment! Otherwise, why emphasize its presence in the first place? Depending upon just what tone and genre the writer is going for, the chandelier either acts like a flyswatter and _kills_ someone, or else it _barely_ misses and provides an excuse for everyone to scream their heads off at such a close call! Gaston LeRoux dropped the chandelier on a woman's head when he wrote _The Phantom of the Opera_ almost a hundred years ago, and the schtick's been imitated ever since! Even by me!"

Her face told him the _Phantom_ reference had been completely wasted on her. He quickly moved back to the main point. "So don't let yourself get caught beneath any _other_ chandeliers tonight, and be sure to yell at me or something if I absent-mindedly start to break my own rule, okay?"

"Okay," she said agreeably.


	6. Ch 6: Yo Ho Ho & a Bottle of Champagne

**Chapter Six: Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Champagne**

For a few minutes now, Sergius had been standing in the doorway, holding the door open. He'd noticed at some point that it appeared to be a heavy metal door sandwiched between thin layers of wood. Hard to break down, he imagined.

Now he supposed he should let go of it and step into the room to help Batgirl look for clues, or whatever they were supposed to look for. But he wasn't sure what would happen if he let go of the door. He started to say something—and Batgirl glanced at him and then dragged a husky pirate toward him.

You wouldn't think a girl her size would be able to move something in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds of inert thug so quickly, but she didn't appear to find it much of a strain. After they had turned the pirate into a human doorstop, Sergius moved forward a few paces and surveyed the other casualties, letting impressions run through his brain as he tried to make sense of it all.

He finally asked: "That makes fourteen bad guys we've met. Is it just me, or are they _all_ singularly untalkative?"

Batgirl shrugged in a noncommittal sort of way.

Sergius reflected she wasn't the type to seek lengthy conversations with her enemies in any event, but he continued doggedly: "Those first two, you took down before they had time to chat. But your other fights tonight have been longer—yet I didn't hear the four in the kitchen trying to coordinate their attacks or anything, and the same goes for these pirates. With so many of them, I'd think at least one would try to yell out orders for a team effort. Don't pirate crews always have a captain?"

"Everyone's a critic," The Spook complained in the usual booming voice from overhead (he must have the whole house wired like crazy). "_I'm_ the captain, and they _already_ had their sailing orders."

"Actually, I think 'sailing orders' are what some higher authority gives _to_ the captain for his next voyage; not what the captain gives to the crew," Sergius corrected, knowing it wasn't worth arguing about, but laying the "pedantic professional wordsmith" bit on thick, just for the heck of it, while he stared at the profile of an unconscious lady pirate and tried to figure out why it seemed vaguely familiar from this angle.

The Spook didn't bother to respond to that bait, so Sergius was free to ponder in peace and quiet. He had long known his memory for faces was nothing spectacular. Sometimes he even got fooled for a minute when the heroine in a movie or TV show had simply changed the color and style of her hair between scenes.

That triggered a chain of thought—Sergius hunkered beside the lady pirate and tugged gently at the thick black curls. They came easily away from her scalp—a wig. Underneath, the real hair was light brown and a bit wavy. Now he had it—Althea Wyndham, daughter of the senior partner of the law firm of Wyndham, Forrestal, Abrams, and Hefnick. Sergius didn't know her well, but had seen her at a few parties within the last couple of years. He thought her major was chemical engineering.

It beggared the imagination to suppose Mason Wyndham's daughter would need to sign up as a villain's henchwoman in order to make ends meet. And Sergius had never seen, nor heard of, her displaying any tendency toward violence as a matter of temperament. But wasn't The Spook supposed to have an uncanny ability as a hypnotist? News reports said he had escaped the electric chair that way, and once nearly got Batman electrocuted because everyone else in the prison saw a convicted murderer when they looked at him on the night of the scheduled execution.

Was that the explanation for these numerous silent adversaries? Innocent bystanders who'd simply been mesmerized into doing as they were told? Saved you all that trouble of recruiting veteran hardcases who might quarrel over their "proper" shares of the take after a big caper, Sergius supposed. Although there didn't seem much prospect of The Spook making a cash profit on tonight's ridiculous activities, regardless of his payroll expenses or the complete _lack_ thereof . . . then Sergius remembered urban legends about "snuff films" and immediately wished he hadn't.

On the other hand . . . one book he'd read on modern myths and conspiracy theories had asserted that the FBI, after many years of looking, had never yet found a copy of a professionally made, mass-distributed, authentically fatal "snuff film" in any hardened criminal's collection of kinky entertainment. If there really was a thriving industry that used real deaths instead of special effects to give the target audience that ghoulish thrill, then some honest-to-goodness _evidence_ should have turned up by now, right?

He scowled, dismissed those vagrant thoughts, and kept his knowledge of this lady pirate's family background to himself. He didn't know why Althea was here, but it might help, somehow, to keep The Spook from realizing Sergius had recognized her. (Anyway, his current theory was that Batgirl would quickly "see" that Sergius had recognized this girl as an acquaintance without his needing to say so. If she really cared, she could always ask him for details.)

"These pirates aren't going anywhere for awhile, I take it?" he asked Batgirl, and judged that her answering smile meant they'd all be completely out of it for at least a few more hours. On that assumption, he added, "Then let's check out the banquet table over yonder, first. I'm curious." They proceeded across the room, past the shattered chandelier, Batgirl silently insisting on leading the way—presumably in case there were more booby traps, but naturally she didn't explain.

The table was well-stocked with a variety of viands, several of them still steaming faintly in the cool air. There were covers over some of the dishes, a fancy glass lid over the entire punch bowl, and plastic wrap over a couple of platters of crackers, vegetables, fruit slices, and so forth. Sergius decided The Spook had wanted to make sure the flying glass from the falling chandelier would be unable to contaminate the refreshments.

Very considerate, in a perverse sort of way. Sergius imagined the guy muttering to himself: _If my "guests" survive the pirates and the chandelier, then at least they won't have to worry about eating bits of glass by accident! After all, serving contaminated victuals would be downright rude! _

Sergius suddenly wondered who had cooked the food and laid it out on the table. The vampires? The pirates? Had The Spook himself taken a hand? Or had he taken the risk of hiring a regular caterering firm under a pseudonym, letting them stock the buffet and then paying them off and dismissing them before bringing his prisoners into the house? Sergius shook his head as he decided it didn't really matter right now.

"I imagine you'll be admiring the lavish spread by now," The Spook said with a certain note of feigned modesty in his eerie voice. (Either he couldn't see exactly what they were doing, or he was _pretending_ he couldn't?) "Don't stand on ceremony—feel free to dig in right away! Got to keep up your strength for the rest of the festivities, kids!"

Batgirl and Sergius exchanged glances and shook their heads in perfect unison. Swallow a supervillain's food and drink without a qualm? Neither of them were _that_ gullible. Even if Sergius was getting hungry, now that his nose was enjoying the aromas surrounding the table.

"Sorry," he said, making little effort to sound regretful, "but I _hate_ to eat on an empty stomach." (He hoped the illogic of that would fluster The Spook for a minute.)

Fat chance. "So soak it with alcohol first!" their host recommended. "Choose your poison!"

Batgirl stiffened and glared at the collection of bottles at the right end of the table, just past the punch bowl. Sergius said quickly, "'Choose your poison' is just a funny way of saying 'select one of the available beverages.' He didn't mean those are laced with something lethal."

Batgirl favored Sergius with a very skeptical look, and he added weakly, "Well, he _shouldn't_ have meant it that way!" He wondered why he was even arguing about this. He had already decided not to drink anything; he'd only wanted to improve her grasp of English idiom.

"I'm not thirsty now, but thanks anyway," he added, directing his words toward the ceiling, _knowing_ The Spook wouldn't believe him, but wondering if prolonging this conversation might offer a chance to pick up a few clues of some sort.

The Spook said: "And what about you, young lady? You must burn thousands of calories in a typical night's work! Don't you feel the need to top off your fuel tank again before further exertions, my precious microchiropteran?"

"That last word means a member of the major suborder of bats," Sergius interpeted, a bit smug at being able to say that so confidently. (After becoming acquainted with the man at a dinner party, Sergius had sent one of his novels to Kirk Langstrom as a gift, and Langstrom had reciprocated with a volume from his own collection. Sergius had actually read it cover to cover—gradually, over a period of weeks—and wading through a book bestowed upon you by Dr. Langstrom was a good way to learn more about bats than you could possibly have needed to know.)

Not that Batgirl seemed to care what The Spook was calling her now. Nor was she wasting time gazing longingly at food she wasn't about to eat. Instead, she was already pointing at the door they _hadn't_ used to enter, and looking quizzically at Sergius. The door had a keypad set in the wall at eye level. . . .

"I don't think we want to waste time on that door," Sergius said. "I'm almost positive we've already seen its other side, at the end of the same corridor that runs past the music room where we met." He paused, then raised his voice to address their captor. "So we'd probably be wasting a perfectly good clue if I figured out the next passcode and used it here? Or is that the only lock which will open after we find the clue you left for us in this room?"

"A valid password will work once, the first time you enter it in any keypad you've seen thus far," The Spook said, probably as pleasantly as his eerie tones could manage. "Which door you try next is entirely up to you!"

"Not exactly a planned linear sequence, then," Sergius muttered. "Well, Batgirl, nothing on the table is seizing my attention, so we might as well try frisking the pirates for clues. You start with the girls, please, same as before."

Sergius found it this time. A male pirate's cloak had an interior pocket, and in the pocket was an old paperback edition of _Captain Blood_, written by Rafael Sabatini. A bestseller in its day. The movie adaptation in the 1930s had been the young Errol Flynn's big breakthrough as a leading man in Hollywood; he only got the title role because none of the established stars were vying for it. After all, how much money could a low-budget pirate movie possibly make? (Tons and tons, as it turned out, when the pirate movie combined Sabatini's plot with Flynn's charisma.)

Inside the book, a loose scrap of paper continued the pirate theme by saying:

_Blackbeard was a child to him._

The answer did not instantly spring to mind, but Sergius saw no percentage in just standing here waiting for it to come to him.

"Lead on," he said to Batgirl. "Pick any of the other doors we haven't tried yet. Then I'll take a crack at deducing the passcode, and we shall see what we shall see."

As they moved away from the table, though, he snatched up a still-sealed bottle of champagne. Something from an old Dick Francis novel had popped into his head. . . .

Batgirl watched him grasp it by the neck, apparently realized he wasn't about to open the bottle for a quick drink, shrugged slightly and didn't say a word (per usual). Sergius nursed the hope that The Spook hadn't seen him grab it, though he was probably kidding himself.

Batgirl led him back into the kitchen . . . around into the corridor on that side of the ground floor . . . and finally rapped on the second door on the left-hand side of that corridor. Then she turned and looked at Sergius expectantly as he caught up.

He peered at the paper again. What was Blackbeard's real name? Edward Teach? Yes. Sergius had no idea what the father's Christian name had been, though.

Sergius tried the key combinations which could mean MISTER TEACH, TEACH SENIOR, and other variations—all unsuccessfully—then decided he was being silly. Nerves must be rattled. Not "his child," but "a child _to_ him." Oddly phrased—there could be other shades of meaning. The relationship to some mentor who had become a substitute father-figure, perhaps? Had there been such a man in Blackbeard's younger days? If so, would The Spook really expect Sergius to know about it?

He thought about the movie _Blackbeard's Ghost_ (starring Peter Ustinov in a hilarious performance), but couldn't remember any father-figures being mentioned in the script.

Pirates, privateers, buccaneers. Who were the other big names, real or fictional? Captain Kidd (unfairly maligned), Henry Morgan, Anne Bonney, Sir Francis Drake, _The Pirates of Penzance_, _Terry and the Pirates_, Jon Valor (The Black Pirate), Long John Silver and all his friends in _Treasure Island_. . . .

Then he had it! He keyed 3-5-4-6-8 (for FLINT) and the door clicked open.

"Sorry it took so long," he apologized to Batgirl as she shoved past him in order to check the room. "I _finally_ remembered that when Stevenson was establishing how ruthless his fictional Captain Flint had been, he had someone say: 'Blackbeard was a child to Flint!' Maybe our host is a Treasure Island fan?"

He broke off as he realized he was only speaking to her back whilst she prowled through the room, seeking and not finding any ambushers this time. Had he really expected her to be interested in the details of how he'd deciphered a clue she couldn't even read? It belatedly occurred to him that if she was illiterate in English—and possibly not literate in any language?—then it was horribly possible that she had never read _Treasure Island_ in any form and didn't know what he was talking about. A wave of sympathy overwhelmed him. He knew children in many parts of the world grew up in what an American would consider wretched poverty, but to be deprived of _Treasure Island_. . . .

But was that why he was here? Because he knew his English literature and she didn't? VARNEY had been odd enough—the sort of thing an English major or career novelist might remember from some old article about the history of vampiric literature in the English-speaking world. Not terribly relevant to conventional detective work, but Sergius had wondered if The Spook was just feeding them a very soft pitch to get the game started without delay.

FLINT, though, was more of the same—a great many Treasure Island buffs could have figured it out eventually, regardless of how much or how little they knew about modern criminology. Sergius had initially expected something closer to a scenario straight out of John Dickson Carr or Agatha Christie. . . . at the back of his mind, he'd been wondering all along when the surprise twist would come. . . .

He collapsed onto a couch which she had already peered behind without finding anything untoward. Now she was behind the draperies across the room. "Batgirl," he said in a strained voice, "he's been lying to us. I don't know _why_ I'm here in the first place, but _not_ for serious detective work—there still hasn't been any! The Spook doesn't care if we might add up to the equivalent of a second-rate Batman—"

Then everything dropped out from under him. If Sergius had been trained for these things, and if he had also possessed lightning reflexes and acrobatic expertise—such as Batgirl obviously enjoyed—then he _might_ have been able to spring away from the couch before it was too late. In reality, of course, couch and passenger plunged down into the basement before he recovered from the shock triggered by that unexpected falling sensation in his belly. And by then the hole above him had closed, of course.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** First I lost the flash drive which contained the rough draft of this chapter, but I found it after a few days. Later, when I was literally a couple of minutes away from uploading the finished product to FanFiction so I could post it, I suddenly had the file get corrupted as I was saving my latest revisions to it. I still don't know how that happened. I eventually was able to use some downloaded software to retrieve most of what I had done in the last few hours before the corruption set in (I had a backup copy from a day or so earlier), but it set me further behind schedule. Now I'll be taking a break from working on this serial, because it's the time of year when I always write a Christmas-themed short story about Cassandra Cain. After I've gotten that out of the way, I'll press onward with this one.

(It helps that I know exactly where I want it all to end up, and in the next couple of chapters, as we switch to Cassandra's point of view again for awhle, you'll start getting a better idea of why The Spook has really gone to such a ridiculous amount of trouble.)


	7. Chapter 7: Throwing Out the Rulebook

**Chapter Seven: Throwing Out the Rulebook**

Batgirl's boots thumped onto the steel plating which had _just _slid sideways to seal a gap in the floor after the couch dropped through it. She had been behind the drapes, studying the window, when she heard Sergius start to speak and then stop in shock. She had reacted, coming out of the drapes as fast as possible . . . but her wild leap across the room was still too late to catch up with him after she saw his head dropping below floor level.

She _wanted _to scream. But that would be pointless. It wouldn't bring Sergius back up here, and it certainly wouldn't make her feel any less guilty about what might be happening to him when she wasn't around to protect him.

Besides, The Spook would probably _enjoy_ hearing her scream. Why give him the thrill?

Not that he intended to leave her alone anyway. "Well, well, well, my little noctule," The Spook's voice said from two sides at once in a new stereo effect. "Lost your new friend? My oh my, who will figure things out for you from now on?"

(Had he just called her a_ knock jewel_? That didn't make any sense. Not that it mattered.)

Batgirl felt no need to answer The Spook's questions, and doubted he'd tell her anything really useful if she asked him some, so she said nothing.

In some of the movies she had been watching in recent months (in an attempt to expand her grasp of English and of social behavior among people who spoke it), this was the point where the angry hero would probably say, "Give him back if you know what's good for you!" or perhaps "You'll never get away with this, you psycho!"

Then the villain would laugh a sneering laugh . . . and, of course, go right ahead with whatever nasty thing he felt like doing next, because the hero was just _wasting time_ by bluffing from a position of weakness, instead of being in a position to force the villain to do anything.

Batgirl figured they could just skip that talk-talk-talk part. She was no negotiator—and as long as she couldn't _see_ The Spook as he spoke, she couldn't tell when he was lying anyway. (Did he _know_ that somehow? Or was he just hiding from her on general principle?)

The Spook had evidently figured out she wasn't interested in _arguing_ with him. He must've turned up the volume to make sure he got her attention; his voice was booming now as he tried again: "There's a fresh clue hidden in that room, of course, and you'll probably find it on your own, but I doubt you'll be able to interpret it. Shall we renegotiate the terms a trifle? To keep the game moving along at a brisk pace, I could _sell _you a passcode in exchange for certain promises. Or perhaps you think you can just twiddle your thumbs until one of the many poor fools you've rendered insensible is able to wake up and exercise his own wits on your behalf?"

Batgirl hadn't even thought of that second possibility—but if The Spook seriously thought she was going to _promise_ him anything nicer than delivering a quick, efficient beating as soon as she found him, he was an idiot. Somehow she doubted that.

Besides, did the passcodes to other doors much _matter _at this point? Sergius had started to say something about The Spook not really caring about the game they had _seemed_ to be playing, and she didn't think it was coincidence that The Spook had suddenly chosen _that moment _to take Sergius away from her before he could finish his thoughts. Whatever it was the villain _really _wanted from a captive Batgirl, he was going to find ways to keep pushing her in the "right" direction for him to get it, whether she could solve his silly puzzles or not.

(Which she probably couldn't, being illiterate, as she had seen Sergius figure out very quickly. He had been tactful enough not to say so, though; so whether or not The Spook knew about that handicap was still unclear. It had been fun, though, teasing Sergius for a minute by answering some of the personal questions he thought he carefully _wasn't_ asking. Knowing that The Spook would be annoyed when he didn't understand what she was talking about had made it funnier.)

Which brought her back to the main point—protecting the nice friendly civilian. Until now, Batgirl had figured one unknown room was as good as another for exploration purposes, so she hadn't been in a hurry to get anywhere in particular. _Now_ the priority was to get down into the basement. _If_ she'd had a chainsaw, or even an ax, she might have tried cutting her way right through the floor—on the theory that it wasn't likely that every square foot had steel plating beneath the surface.

But she didn't have those things. On the other hand: If there was a basement, then somewhere in this house there was a staircase, or at least a ladder, leading down. It was behind a locked door, presumably, but if she could figure out where it was, she'd find a way to get in there, from one direction or another.

Batgirl wished she knew more about architecture.

She thought this house was old. _If_ it had been built a long time ago for "normal use," and _if_ The Spook had only bought it recently, then he _hadn't _paid someone to build the entire thing like a prison, with walls it would take forever to tunnel through if you didn't have the right equipment. Was it possible that he'd put metal doors and fancy electronic locks in every doorframe, and metal bars (full of electricity) over all the windows, while leaving most of the interior _walls_ the way they were to begin with? Probably full of insulation and wiring and stuff, instead of being solid blocks of wood or concrete or whatever?

_First things first. If I were a basement staircase, where would I be hiding?_

_Hmmm._

_Right _under_ the big staircase that goes _up_?_

She did a quick mental review. If you were just inside the front door, looking at the staircase, you saw a little hall running beside it on the left, with doors leading to rooms on the far left of the house, and another little hall running beside it on the right, with a line of doors on the right, and then there was a bend in the hall before you entered the kitchen. But she _hadn't_ seen any doors in the walls on either side of the base of the staircase. That meant there was _a lot_ of space underneath those rising steps, completely unaccounted for.

Perhaps there used to be a door in there somewhere and then The Spook had it sealed up after he had fixed the basement the way he wanted it? One way to find out! She'd just have to bash her way in somehow.

Lacking an ax, even a crowbar would have been nice. But she didn't have one of those either. She did have a piano bench, though—it was still standing where she had left it after breaking a window by the front door. She could break off a couple of legs, if necessary—hard wood, good enough for leverage after you made a hole in a wall.

Or there might be a better way. She decided to make another sweep through the kitchen. She hadn't bothered looking in drawers and cupboards the first time through, so there was no telling what useful items might be tucked away in there. She knew the people she'd stunned in there shouldn't be awake yet—her blows were too precise for the effects to be shrugged off so quickly—but she still stayed alert as she headed back the way she and Sergius had come a few minutes ago. The Spook might have some way to stimulate faster recoveries, and there was no telling who else he had lurking in other rooms in this house, in case she and Sergius had used passcodes differently.

If Oracle were running this show, she would have had control of _every _door so she could let people in and out any time she felt like it, clues or no clues. Batgirl wasn't willing to bet The Spook hadn't thought of that too. If he decided she wasn't giving him enough entertainment, he might turn loose everybody he had left.

That would work out okay. Right now she was definitely in the mood to hit somebody, and if she couldn't make it The Spook just yet, a few dozen proxies would be better than nothing.

* * *

The Spook did not have cameras everywhere in the house—too much trouble to hide them all—but he did have _ears_in each room. So he knew Batgirl was rummaging around in the kitchen now.

He nodded to himself. The slugfests on the ground floor had all been very well and good as a warm-up, but obviously Batgirl was trying to rebel against the "rules of the game" now. Specifically, by seeking a way to _descend _to find Sergius! He had expected nothing less at this stage. Batman wouldn't have just walked away from the "innocent hostage" either, which meant The Spook's lair on the _top_ floor of the house would remain tranquil for awhile longer.

He'd prepared contingency plans in case the early stages had gone differently, with Batgirl and Sergius heading up the stairs instead of sweeping the ground floor first, but it was probably just as well that he wouldn't be needing them now. When this Batgirl saw a target, she _moved _like a hyperactive mongoose. The client had forbidden the use of hypnotism on her, which meant that The Spook had no desire to let her catch sight of him again. Decoys and holograms, perhaps, but no need to give her another shot at his own tender flesh. (Despite the ibuprofen now in his blood, he still had a headache where she had bounced a batarang off him hours ago, although he wasn't about to let her know that.)

It irritated him that he still didn't know very much about this Batgirl. She almost never spoke, which he tended to put down to self-consciousness about an imperfect grasp of English. But it limited his ability to figure out what really made her tick. Accordingly, he had calculated that he must allow plenty of "bonding time" for her to start feeling particularly protective towards Sergius, just in case knowing that hack for a bare minute before he vanished wouldn't trigger the necessary emotional reactions in the young heroine, or not as intensely as tonight's client _required_ as part of the services for which The Spook was being very well paid.

Still a few emotional reactions to go before the finale, though. But The Spook saw no reason to think they wouldn't cross the finish line on schedule!

* * *

**Author's Note:**I knew all along that I was going to show The Spook's thoughts sooner or later, but I'd been debating with myself as to just when the first glimpse of them would come. I finally decided it was only fair to explicitly let my readers know there's an unseen "client" lurking about, before Batgirl actually comes face-to-face with that person. You may want to amuse yourselves by trying to guess the identity of the client.

Beyond what little you could glean from feeble clues in this chapter (and I don't expect them to help much), I'll just add a couple of pointers:

The client is a character who previously appeared as a villain, operating in Gotham City at the time, in one or more comic book stories published in the 20th Century.

The client is also pretty darn _obscure_ by modern standards, so if you're wondering about any of the _famous _villains of Gotham—the sort of people who have repeatedly appeared in episodes of one TV series or another within the past two decades, for instance—then forget it! No Joker, no Scarecrow, no Mister Freeze, no Mad Hatter; not even any of the comic book characters who have used the name "Clayface" somewhere along the line.


	8. Chapter 8: Taking Inventory

**Chapter Eight: Taking Inventory**

Table knives, carving knives, lots of little plastic "knives" where you'd really have to work at it to even draw blood with them.

Forks and spoons. Pots and pans and cookie sheets. Plates—some of hard plastic, and a big stack of stiff paper ones. Some glasses and a few boxes of paper cups. Several kitchen utensils she couldn't even name. (Maybe she ought to learn to cook, one of these days? Right now her abilities stopped at opening a can or a frozen dinner and then putting the food in the microwave for a few minutes.)

A matchbook at the back of a drawer!

Batgirl pondered. Setting the house on fire had a certain appeal. It would _probably_ mess up The Spook's immediate plans. If other people in the neighborhood were awake, and near enough to notice flames dancing in the darkness, then they would call the fire department, and then firemen would arrive with axes and crowbars and other things which might be useful for ripping your way into a house even if it had steel bars blocking the doors and windows.

Flames normally moved up, so if she lit a fire on _this_ floor, or even the next floor up, and if Sergius was still in the basement, he ought to be safe for awhile.

Well, safe from a fire, anyway. Not safe from whatever The Spook had already prepared down in the basement, but you couldn't have everything. And Batgirl would be ashamed of herself if she couldn't dodge a stupid fire for awhile.

Unfortunately . . . Batgirl and Sergius were not the _only_ people in the house, so turning the upper portion of it into a signal fire had serious drawbacks. There were the four unconscious ones right here on the kitchen floor—and they'd be out cold for quite some time yet; she had made sure of that. There were others she had stunned, before and after. She didn't even know how many more minions The Spook had brought in for the evening, still lurking in other rooms. If any died from burns—or just from breathing smoke—before any rescuers could get in, she'd feel awful. (Batman and Oracle wouldn't exactly be _thrilled_ with her performance either.)

And the plan had other weaknesses. She didn't know where the house was, so she didn't know if there _were_ any neighbors who would notice the fire right away. She certainly hadn't seen any telephones in here, although The Spook presumably had a cellphone or some other way of communicating with the outside world when necessary. Batgirl realized she didn't know much about arson—just how _fast_ would this big house burn once she lit up a few curtains or whatever?

And would the first fireman trying to break through a door or window get _killed_ by the electricity in the steel bars before he realized the danger? Trusting The Spook to do the decent thing and turn off the power—as soon as he heard the sirens and realized people were going to force their way in whether he liked it or not—didn't feel like a smart bet.

On the other hand, opening a way to the basement, moving _everyone_ into it (with the possible exception of The Spook, who could probably turn off the electricity and/or move the bars out of his way at any time), and _then_ setting part of the house on fire as a way to "call for help," might be a more workable plan. Maybe. After she had made a clean sweep of the _entire_ house and mopped up any stray bad guys she came across? If she hadn't found any other way to escape the house by that point?

Somehow she didn't think the set-it-on-fire plan was really going to work out—there were probably plenty of other surprises lurking in this house tonight that could ruin any rough plans she made now—but she still tucked the matchbook away in a concealed pocket in her cape, just in case it'd come in handy later. As an afterthought she tore a few paper towels off a roll, folded them up into small squares, and stashed them in her costume too. If she needed matches, she might need tinder. . . .

She hadn't found what she was looking for. Then she realized she hadn't checked the refrigerator yet. Worth a shot.

Various bits of leftover food, baloney, a jug of milk, slices of cheese in little plastic packages, containers of ketchup and mustard, a few more bottles of wine (at least she thought they looked like wine bottles, but she couldn't read the labels and wasn't planning to taste-test anything, so there were other possibilities). Two drawers at the bottom.

She tugged open the right-hand drawer to look in—and flinched away from the spectacle of a human head staring right back at her. For one terrible instant she had been _afraid_ it was Spoiler's head—teenage girl, blond hair, blue eyes open wide, skin much paler than Batgirl's.

After she recovered from that first shock, she bent forward to peer into the drawer again, and realized those weren't really Spoiler's features—similar, but not remarkably so—in fact, the whole thing might not even be . . . real?

Batgirl grabbed the head by the hair and pulled it out of the drawer. No blood was dripping from the neck, although there was some red stuff congealed at the bottom of the drawer, possibly ketchup from the bottle she'd already seen. But inside the base of the severed neck was metal and wires, as if the head came from . . . a robot?

The skin was incredible—not just one smooth layer of rubber or plastic, but with pores, and minor differences in coloring, and other irregularities to make it convincing. The eyes looked like the eyes of someone who's only been dead for an hour or two, and Batgirl had seen enough corpses to qualify as an expert on such details. The hair was _perfect_—heck, might be real human hair from a natural blond; Oracle had once told her that some poor women used to grow their hair long and then sell it to wigmakers so rich people could look good—but it was a robot's head all the same.

Batgirl wondered if she would have been fooled at first if the real robot were here, moving around like a normal human being. Be interesting to test that someday. As was, her ability to read muscular twitches didn't work on the dead, so she hadn't known at first glance that this motionless object wasn't the real thing.

Then an evil laugh filled the kitchen. (The Spook must have _known_ when she opened the drawer, and had given her a minute to react before he gloated at his little joke.) After several seconds, he broke it off to speak normally. "I was dreadfully disappointed when you didn't find that on your _first_ pass through the kitchen, my little barbastelle, but it warms the cockles of my heart to know that my trouble was not for nothing! After a contretemps with some other costumed 'heroes,' a colleague of mine was willing to sell off bits and pieces of damaged androids at scrap prices, and I just knew I'd find a use for that fabulous face, sooner or later! What's a Halloween without a few stray body parts floating around, that's what I always say! Gave you quite a shock, eh?"

Batgirl wasn't about to describe the awful _chill_ she had felt in that first moment. Not to _him_. But the reaction bothered her. She'd stumbled across corpses before, and coped—so didn't she know enough to look at them closely instead of wasting time on a sudden rush of pure fear? Batman would have examined it carefully before reaching any conclusions.

The Spook was perfectly willing to carry on a one-sided conversation, though. "Keep your eyes open, child! The next scraps of flesh and bone may very well be the real thing! If you don't find that Sergius hack all at once, at least you can hope to find him on the _installment_ plan!"

She forced down a surprisingly strong surge of _hatred_ at the sneering sadism of that remark. (It helped that there was no valid target standing right in front of her, or she might have gotten a little carried away in venting her temper.) What was _wrong_ with her tonight? She'd heard equally nasty threats plenty of times, but she didn't know that anything really bad had happened to Sergius yet—The Spook could be bluffing, just trying to make her squirm.

Belatedly she realized Oracle's summary of The Spook's style hadn't mentioned how likely he was to _kill_ people. Some costumed villains did it routinely; others rarely or never. At the time, standing outside the bank, Batgirl had believed their fight would be over in a few minutes, so she hadn't been too worried about the fates of possible future hostages.

She was worried now, though. A couple of carving knives and the piano bench would have to do in cutting or smashing a way through a wall into the descending stairwell. She was headed for the basement with no further delays.

* * *

The Spook checked a screen in his control room. Sergius was still alive, but the client had wanted to warm up with him first, before moving on to the main event. That was all right; Batgirl would take at least a few more minutes to find a way into the basement, and by then the client ought to be ready. There were things The Spook could have done to buy more time, if need be—setting off an explosive charge on the ground floor, for instance—but that would have had to be done very carefully, because he'd _forfeit_ a big chunk of his promised payoff if Batgirl was severely injured before the client was ready to finish her off himself.

(That was what the client _expected_ to do, anyway—The Spook had doubts on the subject, but the last installment of his fee was not conditional upon the outcome of the final confrontation; only upon his _delivering_ her for it, still in reasonably good physical condition, albeit with certain psychological preliminaries already attended to. In just a few minutes it would be time for the client to authorize the wire transfer, and then it would be interesting to see what happened next.)

* * *

**Author's Note:** Remember, this story is set several years ago in the comic book continuity, maybe around late 2001, which means long before Spoiler supposedly died during the "War Games" event. So Batgirl would have been _completely surprised_ to see something which, at first glance, resembled her friend's severed head (although the superficial similarity was probably coincidental).

Incidentally, in the next chapter we'll find out what Sergius has been doing since he was separated from our heroine, and we'll probably get our first look at the mysterious client who's been paying The Spook to arrange this evening's entertainment for him. But i doubt I'll mention the client's colorful alias right away, so you may or may not be able to figure out who we're dealing with. (I'm reasonably certain that Sergius won't have a clue.)


	9. Chapter 9: Voice in the Darkness

**Author's Note:** Yes, we're switching back to Sergius's viewpoint to see what's been happening to him down in the basement, simultaneous with Cassandra's activities in the last couple of installments. He even gets to meet the mysterious client who's been paying The Spook to arrange tonight's fun and games. (This is an honor which Sergius would have been perfectly happy to live without, but I didn't exactly offer him a choice.)

* * *

**Chapter Nine: Voice in the Darkness**

Sergius had only caught a glimpse of his new surroundings before the hole overhead sealed shut. No lights were turned on; not so much as a gleam through a crack overhead; so he sat on the couch in total darkness and listened hard for two minutes before he moved.

His glimpse had shown bare walls and a dirty concrete floor and not much else. If there was a door, it must be behind him—but he wasn't in any great hurry to find it. Walking around in absolute darkness in a presumably booby-trapped basement didn't feel safer than sitting still for awhile.

Sure, there had to be some sort of lifting mechanism underneath the couch, but Sergius was no engineer. His chances of figuring out how to activate it, while working alone, without tools, and in total darkness, were right up there with his chances of being elected to replace Lex Luthor in the White House. Especially if it would be necessary to override "remote control" signals from The Spook's lair.

(Besides, even if Sergius _could_ trigger something to start the couch moving upward, that still wouldn't do any good if he couldn't also figure out how to open up a hole in the ceiling for the couch to pass through.)

So he sat there and prayed Batgirl would have better luck in whatever was happening upstairs. Sergius _knew_ he was not a particularly brave man. Writing about action heroes doing violent things to bad people was all very well and good, but he never lost track of the line between reality and fantasy. He wasn't a rough-and-tumble fighter; he wasn't a crack shot; he wasn't an expert fencer; he didn't have nerves of steel when trouble started. It had been embarrassing, counting on a teenaged girl to protect him from the costumed figures upstairs when a heroic man would have been pulling his own weight in each fracas.

Well, _that_ particular embarrassment wouldn't be recurring in the next few minutes.

Sergius hauled out his handkerchief just in time to absorb a sneeze. The dust down here was awful, and he thought he smelled mold.

Batgirl would be looking for a way to come downstairs. Furthermore, Batman and his cohorts would be looking for Batgirl. By now they must have noticed she was missing . . . right? She probably called in every hour on the hour, or normally wore an active transponder, or something.

Suddenly Sergius saw a rectangle of light on the wall in front of him, the shadow of his own head and shoulders framed within the rectangle. He twisted around in time for his dazzled eyes to make out what he took for the silhouette of a broad-shouldered man standing in a now-open doorway behind him—then the door slammed shut and all was dark as before.

_The Spook?_ Sergius rose to his feet and stepped back from the couch and then to the left, as quietly as he could. His left hand was still clutching the champagne bottle by the neck. If he had to use it as a weapon—

"Greetings, little man."

The resonant baritone had a rather British sound to it—overlaid with something else? One of those spots in the Caribbean, perhaps? Sergius was not Professor Henry Higgins, to pin down the locale of a man's childhood after hearing just a few words of the fellow's diction, but he wasn't tone-deaf either. This was a very different voice from The Spook's, at any rate, but Sergius didn't really think this a promising sign.

Well, talking had to be better than fighting, especially since when you were no good at the fighting. "Hello!" he said, noticing his voice was shriller than usual. "My name is Sergius. I'm a—"

"You are nothing," said the voice, apparently still coming from near the closed door. "You sit at your desk and you write a fable of wish-fulfilment, and then other nobodies purchase enough copies to keep you eating long enough to write another. But if you cease writing, your customers will find other wordsmiths to amuse them. If you die, who will weep at the funeral?"

_So much for any hope that this guy is a fellow victim tonight._ Sergius felt little temptation to argue about the quality of his social life with a strange voice in a dark cellar—so he kept his mouth shut. That didn't seem to matter; the speaker had more to say, and the rhythmic way he intoned each line made it almost hypnotic.

"You have never harmed me, and I am not a sadistic man. I do not need to kill you. I do not even need to hurt you . . . or not much. But I need her to _worry_ about you. If this Batgirl conforms to the usual patterns of her kind, she shrugs off threats to herself, but assigns an inflated value to the lives of 'innocents.'"

Sergius got the idea. He hadn't been dragged to this house tonight to be a detective—he'd been selected as the _sacrificial lamb._ Sure, the baritone said killing him wouldn't be necessary . . . but people had been known to lie, and that part about hurting him "not much" was not as comforting as the speaker might mean it to be.

"So you're not a sadistic man," Sergius repeated, trying to emphasize what little they could agree on. "Great! Me neither! But just what sort of man are you, then? Why do you even _care_ what Batgirl worries about?"

"Ah!" said the baritone sadly. "Thereby hangs a tale."

"I'm not going anywhere," Sergius observed, moving around one end of the couch to keep it between himself and the speaker, who was now on the move as well. Sergius decided, regretfully, not to bother trying to yank the door open; he couldn't see it and with his luck, it would require a key or passcode anyway. Or if he did get it open, he'd probably just run straight into a trap outside. But he was profoundly reluctant to let this unseen broad-shouldered fellow with the odd accent get within arm's reach. Master villains in fiction often had a melodramatic need to lecture about themselves; was it too much to hope that this fellow was a traditionalist in that regard?

Apparently it wasn't too much. The baritone began speaking again, almost chanting: "Once I was a name to be reckoned with. Once I could reach out and bend men's souls to my will and then make them forget what they had done. Once I had a king's ransom in diamonds within my grasp, and planned to use it as the foundation for greater things to come.

"But then I was thwarted by the activities of the insolent wench known as Batgirl. The loss of the diamonds was a mere setback, for I escaped to try again, yet I knew I must find and crush her ere I could hope to regain what I had lost and then go far beyond it.

"Carefully I set my trap. Nervously she walked into it. All necessary preparations were made for her emotional collapse, to be followed by her destruction, and yet somehow, in the final confrontation . . ." The voice trailed off regretfully.

_She kicked your butt?_ Sergius thought, but clamped his lips together rather than ruin the moment.

"Then came the years in prison, little man. Have you so much as set foot inside a prison? The greater part of my power was gone, yet I could have been a 'boss,' leader of one of the gangs, if I cared to seize the burden. Had I expected to spend the remainder of this mortal incarnation behind those walls, I should have done so. Instead, it sufficed to become the gray eminence behind the boss of one of the strongest gangs. That assured me of certain creature comforts and peace of mind. After the humiliation visited upon me by Gotham's Batgirl, I could not accelerate my escape as I once would have easily managed. Yet eventually I was able to persuade the parole board that I had repented of my 'sins' and only hoped to eke out a living with my less frightening skills.

"Once liberated, I could easily gather the tools of my art and prepare to start my work anew, but the dark powers, which I had once invoked so easily, remained largely deaf to my voice. I was not surprised, for I knew there must be a final settling of accounts with She Who Carries The Mantle Of The Bat before my credibility was restored on other planes. Hence I unearthed some wealth which the police had never found, and commissioned the services of The Spook to bring her here so I might complete the task at which I failed before."

"If you're talking about revenge for something that happened several _years_ ago, then this can't be the same Batgirl who gave you grief," Sergius objected, still slowly circling the unseen couch. "The old one had creamy skin and long red hair. This girl is darker and shorter and probably a heck of a lot younger." _Is it possible that this guy hasn't even bothered to _look_ at her face since The Spook captured and unmasked her?_

The hearty laughter filled the air and echoed back from the concrete walls. "Do you think me blind, scrivener? I _know_ she is not the same woman who twice humiliated me. It matters not whether this Oriental chit is the second 'Batgirl' or the twentieth. She _is_ the Lady of the Bats here and now, as truly as any female ever was, and thus the proper target for what I tried and failed to achieve aforetime."

Sergius couldn't remember the last time he had heard anyone call a girl a "chit" in real life. (But in fiction set in Regency England? Yes.) You didn't even hear "Oriental" used for "Asian" all that much, nowadays. Just how old was this ex-convict? Or how old were the textbooks from which he'd learned his English, once upon a time?

"Besides," the mellifluous voice added, "I have reason to believe the first bearer of the mantle still lurks somewhere in the shadows of Gotham, whispering advice to her namesake. Thus, crushing the new one shall also serve to make the old one heartsick, which is not insignificant."

Hmmm? That was the first Sergius had ever heard of any such connection. As far as anyone knew, the old Batgirl might have left Gotham for good at the same time she quit the costumed lifestyle. From what he'd once seen of her, and had heard about her from others, she'd probably had to beat off would-be suitors with a stick in her "secret identity." Perhaps she had finally met the one she didn't care to rebuff, and they'd married and then moved to California (or wherever) to start a new family?

After all, there'd been _years_ with no Batgirl in Gotham before a new one popped up in a different costume, so there was no clear reason to think they two had ever met, much less had a mentor/protégée relationship as the voice now implied.

Perhaps even a _family_ bond? A close genetic tie seemed improbable, but there were other ways to become kinfolk. The Asian lass could be the redheaded woman's foster child or stepchild or sister-in-law or something . . . maybe she hadn't been _allowed_ to risk her neck by continuing the family tradition until she reached a certain age? (Hence the long vacancy in the role of Batgirl?)

A strong hand grasped Sergius's wrist. "This will be over quickly," said the voice, and then something struck hard enough to leave Sergius seeing stars—

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

In this chapter, I had Sergius reflect on the years-long gap between the disappearance from the public eye of the redheaded original Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) and the appearance in Gotham of the new, differently-costumed Batgirl (Cassandra Cain). Even as I wrote that, I anticipated that alert readers would wonder if I had carelessly _forgotten_ about a handful of stories set in the "No Man's Land" era in which Helena Bertinelli (better known as Huntress) briefly served as "Batgirl" in a costume which she had invented herself; the same outfit which Cassandra began wearing soon afterward. The answer is simple: _I_ didn't forget; but I assumed Sergius never really knew about Helena's brief time as "Batgirl" in the first place!

I figure he was gone from Gotham during NML, leaving right after the federal government ordered the area evacuated, and only came back a year later when the city had been largely rebuilt with the help of Lex Luthor (who evidently saw it as a beautiful opportunity to turn himself into a "national hero" and then run for President of the United States). So Sergius completely missed Helena's months as Batgirl, and since Gotham was officially "off limits" at the time, I strongly doubt Helena ever got interviewed on TV or anything similar while she was doing her Batgirl act. All Sergius knows is that when he came back to Gotham there was already "a new Batgirl" in town; one who speaks very little. How would he know she is wearing someone else's old outfit?

(Remember, we comic book readers usually know _a lot more_ about such nitpicking details as who wore which costume in which story than the average member of the "general public" in the DCU is in any position to realize. As another example, I've said before, over the years, that I don't think the "typical Gotham resident" has any idea that the "second Robin" actually _died_ way back in 1988 and was replaced by a "third Robin." Tim Drake, when he took over the role, looked about the same in that costume (black hair, fair complexion, similar height and build) as Jason Todd before him, and Tim _didn't_ make a point of telling every civilian he met: "Hello, glad to meet you! I'm Robin Number Three! My immediate predecessor got himself killed last year!")

P.S. As to the voice which Sergius heard—while the things the voice refers to from previous clashes with the original Batgirl are "in continuity," I did make some arbitrary assumptions about sort of accent this man has (and I also chose to make him a baritone). The comic book writer who created that villain many years ago never saw fit to mention such details in the scripts. But it just doesn't seem right to me to have that guy speak as if he had spent his entire life in Gotham City, so I improvised.


	10. Chapter 10: Fighting Blind

**Chapter Ten: Fighting Blind**

It turned out the original door to the basement stairs was still right where it always had been—set into the side of the base of the staircase leading up to the second floor. It had just been plastered over, heavily enough to make its presence invisible, but once you cleared that out of the way, the door could still be opened in the normal way. The plaster wasn't even damp—must've been there for a long time. Which meant The Spook had other ways of getting in and out of the basement.

Batgirl had used carving knives from the kitchen to probe and slash until she located the door. Then she'd broken up a chair to form makeshift prybars. Now she had a path cleared to let the door swing open into the hallway.

It was possible the door was booby-trapped to explode as soon as she twisted and tugged the knob—but somehow Batgirl didn't think so. The Spook could have killed her easily after the nerve gas paralyzed her, but he hadn't. For that matter, he could have planted _bombs_ under every floor in the entire house—and maybe he had!—but if so, he wasn't bothering to set them off yet, and there wasn't much she could do to stop him if he suddenly changed his mind, so why worry about it?

She yanked the door open. As expected, nothing happened.

Five steps between the doorway and a small, square landing; then the staircase headed off to the right. Solid walls on either side of the steps. There was a light fixture in the ceiling above the landing, but someone had removed the bulb. There was a light switch just inside the door; flipping it achieved nothing.

Even though she'd believed The Spook would want her to open the door and continue, Batgirl found herself reluctant to trust the wooden steps with her weight. The noise she had made ripping open the plaster-layer of the wall must have alerted anyone in the basement that Batgirl was planning to come that way. Besides, it was the only obvious way to go. That was bad. Cain in his own way, and Batman much later, had both emphasized the value of _surprise_. An opponent who knew your path in advance could turn any bottleneck into a deathtrap. But finding another way to get there would take too long. Sergius was down there, and she wasn't betting the bad guys would just leave him alone while they waited for her to join them.

Which didn't mean she had to be completely stupid about this. David Cain, in this situation, would have grabbed an unconscious enemy and tossed him or her tumbling down the stairs to clear the way—testing for land mines or whatever. (And if the decoy arrived at the bottom with a broken neck? Tough.)

Batgirl didn't do things that way—but since there was _no hope_ of maintaining the element of surprise when she went down those stairs, she might as well test them with _something_.

She settled for the slightly-scorched piano bench.

After it went tumbling down the stairs all the way to the bottom, she followed up by tossing down one of the pirate cutlasses. Any nasty device hooked up to a motion detector, pressure detector, metal detector, or plain old tripwire ought to react to at least one item or the other. Nothing happened, so she decided the stairs were safe. (Nobody down there had shot at the piano bench either, which was mildly encouraging.)

Light spilled through the doorway from behind her as she descended, but there was no light source within the stairwell, nor any glow downstairs. She might find a working light or she might not. If not, the further she got from the foot of the stairs, the harder it would be to see anything—

Batgirl was three steps from the bottom when the light from the hallway above . . . went out!

Maybe she should have reversed course. Instead she _accelerated_, working from memory to leap forward, land perched on the piano bench which had fallen on its side at the foot of the stairs, and then bound off to the right, all in pitch darkness.

Batgirl landed on carpeted floor, several feet away from the staircase, having avoided colliding with anything (or anyone) along the way. No sign of an attack. But The Spook had killed the lights when he did for a _reason_ . . .

She had removed a pirate's belt (with scabbard still attached, and cutlass shoved back into scabbard) and buckled it around her own waist before opening the staircase door. Now her gloved fingers snapped the scabbard away from the belt, then she gripped the hilt and began poking around for traps, ambushers, pits, obstructions, anything she could get!

It would be just like a villain to leave Sergius sprawled on the floor down here; bound, gagged, unconscious; so that if Batgirl used sharp metal to scout ahead, she might cut an innocent man's artery before she realized. The scabbard effectively turned a length of sharp steel into a blunt rod, suitable for probing the gloom.

Once upon a time Batgirl had noticed a blind man making his way along a downtown sidewalk. He had radiated admirable confidence, but the most interesting thing had been how he constantly used his white-tipped cane to scout the terrain ahead of his toes. She had shadowed him for ten blocks to study the technique. For her: once seen, never forgotten! She'd figured there was no telling when such skills might come in handy.

She hadn't seriously expected to need that ability while both eyes were still working fine, though. Most places in Gotham were at least dimly lit, even in the quietest hours of the night, and she had years of practice at working in shadow.

She started filling out her mental map of spatial relationships down here. There was a wall in front of her, and immediately to the left was another, meeting the first at a right angle . . . the positions were about right for this to mean she was standing directly beneath the front left corner of the ground floor—if so, there was probably nothing beyond those particular walls except dirt and more dirt. Anything interesting was likelier to be off to her right and/or behind her.

Right came first! Simplest to explore everything on _this_ side of the staircase first, and worry about the other side later. Batgirl pivoted to face the "rear" of the house and started slipping forward, leading with her sheathed cutlass . . .

"What are you doing, you little fool?" Oracle's computerized voice suddenly demanded, and Batgirl instantly jumped forward while swinging the sheathed cutlass to the right, searching for anyone trying to sneak up.

Oracle's "work voice" continued: "Waving swords around? Trapped in a basement? Letting someone take away all the expensive tools in your utility belt? Letting the civilian get snatched from under your nose? Do you have any idea what Batman is going to say about this blundering? I _knew_ he was making a mistake, offering you that costume, but he nagged me into it and now, after all my efforts to train you, you still can't be trusted out in the streets without a keeper, can you?"

The sense of _betrayal_ flooded her mind for a moment—even as she knew it shouldn't have. A voice in a dark room could be coming from _anything_—man, woman, machines, magic spells, who knew? Why did it even rattle her for a few seconds, as if the real Oracle had stopped loving her?

An analogy came. As a child on the streets of a faraway city, she had learned that when she was easily chilled by a sudden breeze, it meant she was becoming feverish. On most days, she could shrug off a bit of wind without thinking twice about it. On a bad day, any change of temperature could make her shiver. Then she had to hole up in some remote spot—an attic of an abandoned building, for instance, with a supply of food and bottled water—and wait a few days for the worst of it to come and go. (In those days, when she couldn't really talk and had no identification documents, going into a hospital felt unthinkably dangerous.)

This new sensation was similar, in a twisted sort of way. She had felt "normal" when she woke up here, and in the fights with costumed people who never spoke and had other odd things about their attitudes, but since around the time Sergius fell through the floor, her reactions had been . . . extreme? Exaggerated? Excessive? Well, one of those words that began with "ex-", or maybe a whole bunch of them at once. Only this time the "shivering" was mental instead of physical—bad surprises instead of sudden breezes were what triggered scary feelings—

There was no warning. The punch came in low from the side and hammered her right kidney. Batgirl staggered—and then threw herself forward, frantic to get away from her last known location before another blow followed the first. But she had dropped the sheathed cutlass in the process, so she'd have to fight without it. Not normally a big problem, if there was only one _strong_ man throwing punches—but normally she could actually see what she was doing!

Wait. The matchbook!

When the lights went out, Batgirl had considered striking a match—and instantly rejected it. The sudden flare might just give unseen bad guys something to shoot at. Her instincts had said to stay in the dark until she had a better grip on the situation. Besides, it would have been just like a villain to have the air down here flooded with something highly flammable and then chortle as the young superhero accidentally roasted herself.

But she wasn't smelling anything like that—just mold and dust and stuff—and now she was willing to risk one match to give her a few seconds' worth of visibility. She danced to one side, very quiet on the carpet, hoping the attacker had lost track of her position as she turned back to face the way she had come. Her hand dipped into a pocket of her cape and pulled out the matchbook. Let her get something burning and she'd be able to see enough to block and counterattack—if there was only one guy, a few seconds ought to be plenty—

Batgirl's fingers yanked loose one match, then scratched its head against the rough strip on the book . . .

_. . . and nothing happened. _

Shock made her freeze for a moment too long, and in that moment someone hit her again, in the midsection. She managed to block a follow-up blow to the head by some combination of reflex and luck, but her attempt at a leg-sweep was easily countered.

Batgirl jumped back—she thought she barely dodged another blow in doing so—and found her back against a wall. Unwilling to stay there, she slid quietly to the left, which ought to take her toward the walled side of the staircase—and something tripped her. She rolled with it and ended up—she thought—against the wall which formed one side of the staircase, painfully aware that the attacker didn't have any trouble finding her whenever he wanted her.

She had been small and scared and lonely and unable to communicate. She had been cold and hungry and tired. She had been many unhappy things, in many times and places, but she had never felt quite so _helpless_ in a fight with a single attacker.

This experience reminded her of Oracle's holographic files on "King Snake." The blind martial artist who preferred to strike in the dark, where his quarry's eyes would be rendered useless. Robin had reported getting around that once in a dark room; using a whistling bamboo staff to misdirect King Snake's attention just long enough for Robin to swing down from behind and knock him out a window.

On the other hand—Batman had later used night-vision goggles to kick King Snake's butt in a fight inside a dark ship, when the blind crimelord and his Ghost Dragons had tried to take over a big piece of Gotham's underworld. That night, King Snake must have felt very much the way she felt right now—

_WHAM!_ Another blow rocked her, but Batgirl tried to grab the wrist before he could pull it back. If she could just get some leverage—

Her gloved fingers barely brushed a hand before she lost track of it again.

She threw a blind punch that impacted a man's heavily-muscled chest—bare, she thought—but bruising him there wasn't going to win this fight, and he blocked her _next_ strike. No question about it; the attacker could see her moves! Might be goggles. Might be metahuman perceptions. Telepathy, even? Was this how ordinary people felt when Batgirl saw all _their_ moves coming a mile away? A crushing _despair_ that told you a continued effort was only stretching out the pain and not avoiding the final defeat?

The next few minutes were brutal.

She could ignore pain better than most, but she was still flesh and blood and bone, not a robot. Each blow her silent attacker landed was draining her strength, making it that much easier for him to repeat the process. She landed a few of her own, but not placed well enough to matter. She kept expecting to pass out . . . and eventually she did after something slammed into the side of her head.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Well, I sure didn't enjoy doing that to her, and I'm not satisfied with how I wrote it, but I finally decided to post it anyway and move on. I had thought I was going to reveal the identity of her attacker in this chapter, but since I ended up with Cassandra knocked unconscious while still in total darkness, I decided I'd better wait until she can see what she was up against. The attacker could have taunted her verbally and introduced himself in the process, but I finally rejected that alternative.


End file.
